The Delhi government announced on Tuesday that the city’s hospitals are running out of medical oxygen for coronavirus patients, citing increasing infections and deaths as a result of a second wave of the pandemic.
In the next eight to 12 hours, virtually all of Delhi’s big private and government hospitals will run out of oxygen, according to Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia. Oxygen is in short supply at a number of prominent hospitals, including the Max Hospital and Sir Ganga Ram Hospital.
We have been demanding for a week that the central government raise the oxygen supply quota to Delhi, which they must do,” Sisodia wrote on Twitter. “There will be a public uproar if adequate oxygen does not hit the hospitals by tomorrow morning.
Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s Chief Minister, has also urged the Centre to solve the city’s severe oxygen shortage. He wrote, “Some hospitals are left with just a few hours of oxygen.” Kejriwal said on Sunday that the Centre had diverted the city’s oxygen allocation to other nations.
The Delhi High Court had earlier on Tuesday questioned why the Centre had waited until April 22 to prohibit the use of oxygen in factories, despite the extreme shortage in the national capital. “Industries should wait,” says the author. Patients are unable to do that. The court said that “human lives are on the line.”
The bench then ordered the Centre to quickly enforce the ban, stating that “any delay would result in the loss of precious lives.”
India is now facing an alarming second wave of the pandemic, with the nation registering the highest number of infections since the epidemic began in January of last year. The country’s healthcare infrastructure is in shambles due to the sheer amount of outbreaks – and the pace at which the epidemic is circulating.
As coronavirus patients flood overburdened hospitals around the world, many states are running out of oxygen. Supplemental oxygen is also used in hospitalized Covid-19 patients who are chronically ill in order to increase the oxygen flow in the blood and lungs.
In Delhi, as well as other cities, the crisis has continued. People are looking for beds, ventilators, and medications on social media, while relatives throng pharmacies looking for the antiviral drug Remdesivir, which hospitals have long run out of.
