Scarce medical oxygen worldwide leaves many gasping for life

CONAKRY (Guinea): Soaring demand for oxygen prompted by the Coronavirus is bringing out a stark global truth: Even the right to breathe depends on money.

In wealthy Europe and North America, hospitals treat oxygen as a fundamental need, much like water or electricity. It is delivered in liquid form by tanker truck and piped directly to the beds of Coronavirus patients. Running short is all but unthinkable for a resource that can literally be pulled from the air.

But in poor countries, from Peru to Bangladesh, it is in lethally short supply. Across sub-saharan Africa, oxygen is a costly challenge for government-funded medical facilities such as Guinea's Donka public hospital in the capital, Conakry. The hospital's planned oxygen plant has never started up. So instead of piping oxygen directly to beds, a secondhand pickup truck carries cylinders over potholed roads from Guinea's sole source of medical-grade oxygen, the SOGEDI factory dating to the 1950s. Outside the capital, in hospitals and medical centers in remote villages and major towns, doctors say there is no oxygen at all.

Oxygen is one of the most important interventions, (but) it's in very short supply, said Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the CDC and current president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives.

In Bangladesh, the lack of a centralized system for the delivery of oxygen to hospitals has led to a flourishing market in the sale of cylinders to homes. In Peru, the president has ordered industrial plants to ramp up production for medical use or buy oxygen from abroad. He allocated about 28 million for oxygen tanks and new plants.

But a massive production increase or an impromptu private marketplace are both out of reach in Guinea, where GDP per capita is 850.

Alassane Ly, a telecommunications engineer and US resident who split his time between the Atlanta suburbs and his homeland, boarded a flight to Guinea in February. He promised his wife and young daughters he'd be home by April to celebrate

Ramadan.

Then he fell ill. On May 4, struggling to breathe and awaiting results for a Coronavirus test, he was turned away from two medical facilities that said they weren't equipped to help.

Finally, his brother-in-law drove him through curfew checkpoints to Donka hospital, where he finally got the oxygen he had sought all day.

It was apparently too little and too late. Within hours, he was dead. Six weeks later, his Coronavirus test came back positive.

His death sparked a furor in Guinea, prompting denials from the health minister that Ly had received anything except the best care.

Ly's widow, Taibou, said she can accept her husband's death as God's will, but said she cannot accept a medical system that failed.