Out of Oxygen: The India Covid Crisis

[muriel_volestrangler]

A tanker carrying medical oxygen from the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand to central Madhya Pradhesh was halted after it crossed the border into Uttar Pradesh on 25 April. India registered more than 350,000 new Covid-19 cases that day. The vehicle was on a tight deadline; patients on ventilators were urgently awaiting its arrival. The driver alleges that police commandeered the tanker at Varanasi and took it further off course into the state, to Jhansi. When the oxygen did not arrive at Sagar as scheduled, state chief ministers got involved. The UP government reluctantly parted with the tanker, but has since denied the incident ever took place. As India is overwhelmed by a second wave of the virus, the country has run out of oxygen.

The state government of Haryana has accused the city of New Delhi of ‘looting’ its oxygen: a tanker passing through Delhi was allegedly stopped by a team of policemen who filled a waiting set of cylinders. In other states, desperate family members, friends and even patients have seized cylinders from vans, hospitals and storage units. Tankers are being retrofitted with GPS tracking systems. Oxygen now travels with police convoys. But it can be lost even if it reaches a hospital: in Nashik, Maharashtra, a tanker replenishing hospital cylinders began to leak gas into the air. The fire department was called, but in the thirty minutes it took to identify and fix the fault, the oxygen supply to the hospital was suspended and twenty-four patients died.

According to a recent report in the Ken, during the first wave of the pandemic last year India needed about seven hundred tonnes of liquid oxygen per day. Demand is currently at eight thousand tonnes, and rising. Indian gas production plants are geared towards making oxygen primarily for manufacturing purposes: mining; the processing of iron and steel; the making of smartphones. While companies are trying to divert the supply to medical institutions, they don’t have the infrastructure to distribute it outside their existing networks. Oxygen travels by road from the industry-heavy east of the country to the west. The gas is a severe fire hazard and cannot easily be airlifted. Covid patients with low oxygen saturation levels may require twenty to sixty litres of oxygen a minute, and are dying because of the smallest stoppages in supply.
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The already fragile welfare state has collapsed. Parks are being converted into crematoriums, crematoriums have run out of firewood, pharmacies no longer have sufficient supplies even of paracetamol, there are weeks-long waiting lists at metropolitan test centres. The peak is yet to arrive. According to data scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology, mid-May could see a surge of up to 480,000 new registered cases a day. Not only does the Modi government actively deny the oxygen shortage, it has squashed high court orders calling for restrictions, containment zones or lockdowns. The Supreme Court has taken suo moto cognisance to centralise Covid policy under its aegis, effectively disabling the autonomy of state judicial authorities. The central government does not seem to have learned from last year’s crisis: expert advice on long-term infrastructure and planning to prepare for new strains of the virus, or even to anticipate a second wave, was ignored. A national Covid-19 taskforce, designed to advise the central government, didn’t convene in February or March. Treatment protocol has not been updated since July 2020.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/april/out-of-oxygen

[Maxheader]

1. sad situation.

And here i thought we'd start wars over oil...

[keithbvadu2]

2. Like electricity and water, we take it for granted until the supply runs short of demand.

Like electricity and water, we take it for granted until the supply runs short of demand.

Confiscating deliveries... sounds like Jared and Donald with PPE.