[At least 10 people, and possibly
as many as 24, died after a hospital ran out of an increasingly precious
resource here: medical oxygen. It was the latest in a growing series of such
accidents.]
By Sameer Yasir and Suhasini Raj
Some anguished family members sent
desperate pleas for oxygen on social media. Others grabbed their phones and
frantically dialed local politicians. A few even sprinted down the hospital’s
hallways, desperately searching for a doctor, a nurse, anyone, to help.
But nothing worked. There was no
oxygen left.
“Everyone was helpless,” said Rani,
who goes by one name, and whose husband Sureendra, 29, was among several
Covid-19 patients who died because the lifesaving oxygen had suddenly run out.
“I want to kill myself. What will I do without my husband now?”
Local officials provided different
accounts of the death toll at the hospital. Some said that at least 10 died
from oxygen deprivation. Others said that 14 more died after the accident but
that they died of comorbidities related to Covid, not directly from the oxygen
shortage.
Officials were clear, though; the
oxygen had run out.
“The deaths happened between Sunday
and Monday morning, but we can’t say all died due to lack of oxygen,” said M.R.
Ravi, an official in Chamarajanagar, a town in the southern part of Karnataka.
“We are investigating the cause.”
What happened at the Chamarajanagar
District Hospital in Karnataka on Sunday night and into Monday morning, after
the oxygen disappeared, is the latest in a series of deadly accidents occurring
across India as the country battles
a tremendous second wave of infections and demands for medical oxygen
far outstrip supply.
Last week, after oxygen ran out at
one hospital in India’s capital, New Delhi, 12 people died. The week before
that, it was 20. On Monday, four sick people died in a hospital in Madhya
Pradesh State, in central India, after family members said that there, too, the oxygen had run
out though officials denied that.
Doctors at dozens of hospitals in
Delhi have been warning that they have come dangerously close to running out as
well and that it was untenable to keep waiting for last-minute supplies to
arrive. As the latest incident shows, at a hospital more than a thousand miles
from the capital, oxygen shortages have now spread nationwide.
Other countries, from Mexico
to Nigeria, have faced oxygen shortages as well, and the World
Health Organization estimated earlier this year that 500,000 people were
in need of medical oxygen every day.
But no country has seen as many
sick people desperate for oxygen as there are in India right now, and the
deadly accidents, like what just happened in Karnataka, keep repeating
themselves.
“It is a failure of governance,”
said Ritu Priya, a professor, at Center of Social Medicine and Community Health
in Jawaharlal University, in New Delhi. “We were not able to channelize oxygen
distribution over the past year, when that is what we should have been doing.”
“We are living from oxygen cylinder
to oxygen cylinder,” she said.
Medical oxygen has suddenly become
one of the most precious resources in India, and the need for it will continue
as the surge
of coronavirus infections is hardly abating.
On Monday, the Indian federal
Health Ministry reported 368,147 new cases and 3,417 deaths from the virus, a
figure that remains low on the first day of the week. The Indian
government says that it has enough liquid oxygen to meet medical
needs and that it is rapidly expanding its supply. It blames logistical issues
for shortages of oxygen, but many doctors and sick people question that.
While people continue to die from a
lack of oxygen, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and the local
government in Delhi, the epicenter of the oxygen crisis, are fighting in court.
On Saturday, a court in New Delhi
warned the federal government that it will face contempt charges if it does not
maintain a steady stream of oxygen to hospitals in New Delhi, the government of
which is run by an opposition party.
“The water has gone above our
head,” a judge said in the court. “Enough is enough. You made an allocation of
oxygen to Delhi, you fulfill it.”
Representatives of the federal
government told the court on Sunday that its officials are working hard to deal
with the crises and any such order would have a demoralizing effect on them.
“Whatever oxygen is being supplied
in Delhi is also not being distributed and utilized in a judicious manner,
causing serious risk to the lives of residents of Delhi,” lawyers representing
the federal government told the court.
India has been receiving aid from
other countries, and many have airlifted oxygen generators, including France,
which delivered eight oxygen generator plants on Sunday, and from Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab Emirates. The country has also received six planeloads of
equipment and supplies including material for coronavirus vaccines from the
United States.
What is complicating matters in
India is that the oxygen production facilities are concentrated mostly in its
eastern parts, far from the worst outbreaks in Delhi and in the western state
of Maharashtra, requiring several days’ travel time by road.
In recent days delays in moving
oxygen to the hospitals in cities that are far from the generating plants have
caused deaths which could have been avoided, experts said. On Saturday 12
patients, including a doctor, died when a hospital in New Delhi ran out of
oxygen for an hour, according to Sudhanshu Bankata, an official of the Batra
Hospital, where the deaths took place.
The same thing happened at Jaipur
Golden Hospital in New Delhi. Dr. Deep Kumar Baluja, an administrator at the
hospital, which is dedicated to Covid-19 patients, said his hospital had been
getting oxygen supplies each day at a specific time from the suppliers. But on
April 24, Dr. Baluja said, those supplies failed to arrive on time.
The 20 patients died “one after
another,” he said. “I have no words to express what I felt when patients died.”
Chamarajanagar district is a
majority tribal and densely populated area of the Karnataka state, which has
recorded over 1.6 million virus cases and over 16,000 deaths. It is home to
three tiger reserves and many wildlife sanctuaries and infections there have
soared because of vaccine hesitancy and relaxed attitude, one local official
said.
Dr. K. Sudhakar, the health
minister of Karnataka, said what happened at Chamarajanagar District Hospital
is an “unfortunate incident.” He was on his way to the hospital to check the
situation on the ground.
The investigation at the hospital
continues. On Sunday evening at 6:30 p.m. doctors and paramedical staff said
they had run out of oxygen and contacted everyone they could think of to get
help.
While the hospital had some backup
supplies they ran out at around 11 p.m., hospital authorities said their
desperate pleas for more oxygen fell on deaf ears. Hospital officials said
fresh oxygen supplies weren’t delivered until around 9 a.m. on Monday morning.
Officials in the neighboring
district of Mysore, which is one of the hot virus spots in the state, said
they sent supplies late on Sunday evening, but
Chamarajanagar district officials said none arrived at the hospital.
Rani, 28, a staff nurse and the
wife of Sureendra, who was in the I.C.U., said she spoke to her husband around
8:30 p.m. on Sunday when he was eating dinner and sounded fine, she said.
But around 11:30 p.m., he called
his wife, gasping for breath, she said.
“Please come here, I don’t want to
die without seeing your face,” he said.
Rani said she was shocked and
called hospital authorities, who said they would arrange the oxygen soon. She
called her husband again and told him to do breathing exercises and try to lay
face down.
She asked neighbors to accompany
her to the hospital, a journey of 45 minutes from their village home, but they
refused, saying it was risky to travel at night.
When she arrived at the hospital
her father-in-law told her she was now a widow. Her husband had died early on
Monday, during that 10-hour period when the hospital was out of oxygen.
“God has been very unkind and cruel
to me,” she said. “The happiness he gave me briefly has been snatched from me.”
Sameer Yasir is a reporter for The
New York Times, covering the intersection of identity politics, conflicts and
society. He joined The Times in 2020 and is based in New Delhi. @sameeryasir
Suhasini Raj has worked for over a
decade as an investigative journalist with Indian and international news
outlets. Based in the New Delhi bureau, she joined The Times in
2014.