25 Ganga Ram patients die as hospitals gasp for oxygen
■ Wrong to say deaths occurred due to oxygen shortage: SGRH head
Twenty-five of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital’s “sickest” Covid-19 patients died in 24 hours and the lives of 60 more hung in precarious balance, officials said on Friday, as the scramble for oxygen got increasingly frantic in hospitals across the national capital.
Sources said low pressure oxygen could be the likely cause of the deaths in Ganga Ram, one of the city’s biggest and most high-profile hospitals where healthcare staff was reduced to manually ventilating patients in its ICU and emergency department.
The hospital announced the deaths shortly after 8.00 am.
After the unprecedented crisis of the morning, an oxygen tanker did reach Ganga Ram in Central Delhi at 9.20 am but it was enough to last up to about five hours depending on consumption, an official at Ganga Ram said.
“It is wrong to say the deaths occurred due to oxygen shortage. We provided oxygen to patients manually when the pressure dipped in the ICU,” SGRH chairman Dr D. S. Rana said.
More than 500 coronavirus patients, including around 150 on high flow oxygen support, are admitted in his hospital.
“Ventilators and BiPAP machines are not working effectively. Lives of another 60 ‘sickest’ patients are at risk. Major crisis likely,” a senior official at the hospital said.
The oxygen emergency was mirrored at the Max Hospitals as well.
Though no deaths were reported, Max Healthcare sent out an SOS on Twitter at 7.43 am, saying that Max Smart and Max Hospital Saket had less than an hour of oxygen left for about 700 patients admitted.
Indian Spinal Injuries Centre in Vasant Kunj also posted on Twitter at 4.20 pm that it was left with only one hour of oxygen and asked for help at the earliest.
A senior official of the Batra Hospital said the oxygen situation at their facility is extremely poor. Sources at the Holy Family hospital also said that they had received emergency oxygen supply from the Delhi government but the "stock can last for six hours". Meanwhile, Dwarka-located Aakash Healthcare managed to refill their cylinders through small vendors across the city.
St Stephen's hospital in Tis Hazari also said they had received a oxygen tanker in the morning.
Faced with a staff shortage and resource crunch, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) also discontinued contact tracing of exposed healthcare workers and quarantine of asymptomatic contacts.
Only symptomatic healthcare workers (HCWs) will be tested and only those testing positive will be isolated and managed as per the clinical condition. The decisions were taken, on Thursday, at a Covid-19 review meeting held under the chairmanship of AIIMS director Dr Randeep Guleria.