‘Oxygen, oxygen, oxygen’:

Nigeria battles shortages amid COVID-19 surge

THE Lagos businesswoman recalled the “horrendous” week she spent in the COVID-19 wing of a city public hospital, where the sense of crisis was lifted only briefly by whoops of joy when a patient secured one of the few available tanks of oxygen.

“There was a shortage,” the 47-year-old, who did not wish to be named in order to protect the staff who struggled to treat her, told Reuters. “It was discussed all around. It felt like that was the main issue – oxygen, oxygen, oxygen,” she said, convalescing in a private hospital to which she moved.

Authorities are battling a second wave of infections that has caused nationwide oxygen shortages. Hospitals in the capital, Abuja, have come close to running out, while demand in Lagos, the centre of the outbreak, has increased as much as sevenfold since early autumn.

“There was a national scarcity of oxygen. We were pulling from all our normal suppliers, and finding new suppliers,” Lagos State Health Commissioner

Akin Abayomi told Reuters in an interview.

Demand for cylinders in Lagos went from around 70 per day early last year to as high as 500 daily from November, Abayomi said.

Nigeria, population 200 million, was spared the worst in its first COVID-19 wave that began in February last year.

But a second wave has hit hard. More than half of Nigeria’s 131,242 confirmed cases have been logged in the past three months. Fatalities now total 1,586.

In December, the government enlisted Nigeria’s Air Force to increase liquid oxygen production at a plant in the northeastern city of Yola and fly 117 cylinders to two COVID-19 centres in Abuja.

Authorities pledged in January to build a new oxygen plant in each of Nigeria’s 36 states. (Reuters)