MUMBAI — Sanchi Gupta was running around, trying to get her hands on an oxygen cylinder — even an empty one.
Her mother was one of 140 COVID-19 patients in Saroj Hospital, one of the best-equipped hospitals in India’s capital New Delhi. She was on a ventilator in intensive care. Then the hospital told Gupta and other families that its oxygen supply had run out. So they had to go out and find oxygen cylinders to bring to the hospital to keep their loved ones alive.
“We are not getting full cylinders, so we are trying to find empty cylinders, because we can still get those filled,” Gupta explained to local media outside the hospital last month. “We’re in contact with NGOs [in the hope that they have tanks that can fill cylinders], everybody! We’re using every kind of pressure, every contact. We are desperate.”
She pleaded for answers from strangers on the sidewalk outside the hospital.
“What is happening with the government? Why don’t we have oxygen?” Gupta cried. “Why? Why is this happening?”
In India, procuring oxygen is a task that normally doesn’t fall to patients’ families. But with the country confirming more than 300,000 coronavirus cases a day for the past two weeks, medical supply chains have broken. In addition to oxygen, there are shortages of hospital beds, antiviral drugs, coronavirus test kits – virtually all the tools any country needs to fight a pandemic.
It’s a consequence, experts say, of decades of neglect and lack of spending on public health in a country of nearly 1.4 billion people – which is now hit by the biggest coronavirus wave in the world.
“It is disheartening. We are not a rich country. There has always been an inadequate health budget,” says Dr. Vineeta Bal, an immunologist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research.
Bal notes that India invests less on public health — just above 1% of its gross domestic product — than most of its peers. Brazil spends more than 9% of its GDP on health; in the United States, the figure is nearly 18%.
“One percent of GDP is a pathetic state of affairs,” Bal says. “It’s nothing!”
At Saroj Hospital, local government officials eventually got a giant tanker to deliver oxygen, replenishing stocks for Gupta’s mother and other patients. In the end, they didn’t have to rely on the small cylinders families were able to scrounge up.
Other hospitals have not been as fortunate.
Hospital SOS: ‘Kindly help us in procuring [oxygen]’
On Tuesday, as many as 24 patients died after the Chamarajanagar District Hospital in the southern state of Karnataka allegedly ran out of oxygen. On Saturday, 12 COVID-19 patients died at Delhi’s Batra Hospital after an oxygen delivery was delayed by just 90 minutes. Several more such incidents have been reported across the country.
And it’s not just COVID patients. A children’s hospital near the capital put out an SOS notice Saturday, warning that it was running out of oxygen and that six babies in critical care might suffer “severe consequences.”
“Kindly help us in procuring [oxygen cylinders] for the sake of the babies and mankind,” a press release from the hospital said, which was shared on social media. The notice was addressed “to whom it may concern.”
The Allahabad High Court in northern India on Tuesday declared that hospital deaths from oxygen shortages amount to “genocide.” In India, courts frequently work in a suo moto capacity (the term means “on its own”), investigating issues of public concern without the need for a lawsuit to first be filed. In this case, the Allahabad court began investigating oxygen shortages because of viral videos showing such shortages in its jurisdiction.
“This wave [of infections] happened so fast! So it was very difficult to manage all the things. People at home also bought [oxygen] cylinders and started using them,” says S.D. Mishra, who oversees COVID-19 oxygen supply at the Petroleum and Explosives Safety Organization, a government agency that regulates the transport of oxygen and hazardous substances. “So because of this panic situation, there was a sudden increase in demand in oxygen supply.”
“We actually have excess production and storage [of oxygen] in eastern India and other areas, but Delhi is having problems,” Mishra told NPR by phone from his agency’s headquarters in Nagpur, central India.
These shortages have been happening even as the U.S. and many other countries pour aid into India. That includes empty cylinders and oxygen concentrators, machines that extract oxygen from the air and concentrate it for medical use.
