Covid-19 in India: Patients are dying due to lack of oxygen. Is government responsible?

The second wave of Covid-19 is definitely creating shock waves in the country and the worse thing is that the hospitals are unable to treat patients due to lack of beds, oxygen and the list goes on.

Oxygen saturation in the blood below the level of 94 is considered as a serious matter for the Covid patients.

A patient, Srivastava (a freelance journalist) on April 16 took to his Twitter handle and said that his level was 52 and that no hospital in Lucknow is responding to his phone calls. He was 65.

Responding to the tweet, the media advisor of UP Chief Minister requested for more details. But unfortunately, his oxygen levels had fallen to 31.

And on Saturday, his son tweeted that his father died and blamed the government. This is undeniably a case of unavailability of oxygen.

As per a report in Scroll, just near Srivastava’s home, the government-run Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Civil Hospital has been waiting for an oxygen generation plant. It is one of 150 district hospitals across India for which the Central government floated tenders in October, eight months into the coronavirus pandemic, to create units that can produce medical oxygen on site. But six months later, the oxygen plant is yet to be installed.

Shockingly, nearly three million people live in the city and among them there are 44,485 cases of Coronavirus. This is not the only case, but 1200 km away in Navsari, another hospital refused admissions of the patients due to shortage of oxygen. Also, five other patients died due to the same reason.

Without any doubt, one can say that the patients of Covid-19 are dying due to the shortage of oxygen.