Covid India: Situation Worsens As Oxygen Falls Short

Indian hospitals are now at full capacity with Covid patients not getting beds and with supplies of oxygen running short. A picture on the internet goes viral, showing two men sharing a single bed. They were seen wearing oxygen masks and the picture is reportedly from a government hospital in Delhi. The sight left many citizens in sorrow and shaken thinking about the predicament that we are facing.

Now that the oxygen is scarce, a hundred new hospitals will reportedly get their own oxygen plants with funds from the PM-CARES fund, the government said on Thursday. The reports say that 162 Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) plants will help hospitals make their own medical oxygen and it has been sanctioned under the PM-CARES fund.

On the other hand, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-Indian Institute of Petroleum (CSIR-IIP), Dehradun, has developed oxygen enrichments units as a part of their efforts to generate up to 500 litres per minute of medical-grade oxygen. Also, the government stated that it would import 50,000 metric tonnes of medical oxygen to heavy-burned states. In the last 24 hours, India has added over 2 lakh infections with 1,038 deaths.

Last year, India reported under 10,000 new daily cases but today the cases have crossed 200,000 on Thursday and it is the HIGHEST anywhere in the world. The hospitals can be seen patients overflowing casualty wards and a stream of ambulances outside. Due to insufficient number of ambulances, virus-contracted people are also seen arriving in buses and three-wheeled autorickshaws.

And today, the youngest patient was a newborn baby. The unfortunate scenes of relatives weeping outside hospitals in the scorching sun, waiting to receive the bodies of their loved ones is heart-rending. In spite of all these, some individuals lack comprehending the seriousness of the grave situation. Out of apathy, people are not following the Covid guidelines.