Scarce medical oxygen worldwide leaves many gasping for life

Guinea’s best hope for coronavirus patients lies inside a neglected yellow shed on the grounds of its main hospital: An oxygen plant that has never been turned on.

The plant was part of a hospital renovation funded by international donors responding to the Ebola crisis in West Africa a few years ago. But the foreign technicians and supplies needed to complete the job can’t get in under Guinea’s coronavirus lockdowns — even though dozens of Chinese technicians came in on a charter flight last month to work at the country’s lucrative mines. Unlike many of Guinea’s public hospitals, the mines have a steady supply of oxygen, The Associated Press reported.

As the coronavirus spreads, soaring demand for oxygen is bringing out a stark global truth: Even the right to breathe depends on money. In much of the world, oxygen is expensive and hard to get — a basic marker of inequality both between and within countries.

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 literally can be pulled from the air.

In Spain, as coronavirus deaths climbed, engineers laid seven kilometers (four miles) of tubing in less than a week to give 1,500 beds in an impromptu hospital a direct supply of pure oxygen. Oxygen is also plentiful and brings the most profits in industrial use such as mining, aerospace, electronics and construction.

But in poor countries, from Peru to Bangladesh, it is in lethally short supply.

In Guinea, oxygen is a costly challenge for government-funded medical facilities such as the Donka public hospital in the capital, Conakry. Instead of the new plant 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 medical centers in remote villages and major towns, doctors say there is no oxygen to be found at all.

The result is that the poor and the unlucky are left gasping for air.

“Oxygen is one of the most important interventions, (but) it’s in very short supply,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US and current CEO of Resolve to Save Lives.

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 with them.

Then he fell ill. Struggling to breathe and awaiting results for a coronavirus test, he went with his brother-inlaw on May 4 to a nearby clinic on the outskirts of Conakry. But they weren’t equipped to help.

His condition worsening, he tried the Hospital of Chinese-guinean Friendship, which also turned him away, his family says. Finally, his brother-in-law drove him through curfew checkpoints to the intensive care unit of the Donka Hospital for 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 has sparked a furor in Guinea. The country’s Health Minister Rémy Lamah maintained that Ly got excellent care at Donka.

But when Lamah himself came down with coronavirus this month, he, like other top government officials, went to a military hospital only for VIPS.

Ly’s widow, Taibou, said if Lamah was so confident about Donka, he would have gone there himself. She accepts her husband’s death as God’s will, but said she cannot accept a medical system that failed.

“One life is not worth more than another,” she said from her home in Atlanta. “They will have to live with their conscience.”

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