On April 25 when 25-year-old Syed Ali’s oxygen levels dipped perilously low to 78 percent, his family in Indarwa Abdullah, a village in Bih...
On April 25 when 25-year-old Syed Ali’s oxygen levels dipped perilously low to 78 percent, his family in Indarwa Abdullah, a village in Bihar’s Gopalganj district, rushed him to the district hospital. He was put on oxygen therapy, but it was not helping. He needed a ventilator, the doctors said.
The Gopalganj district hospital has three ventilators that it received from the Central government last September. But seven months later, as Bihar battles a deadly surge of Covid-19, with daily caseload this week increasing to more than three times the peak seen last year, these life-saving devices are little more than furniture here.
“We do not have an anaesthetist to operate them,” said a district health official.
After much effort, Ali’s family managed to arrange an ambulance to ferry him to Patna, but not enough oxygen to last the four-hour journey. Consequently, his condition deteriorated even further on the way. He died soon after in a private hospital in Patna.
Two days later, in adjoining Siwan, when Mangal Kumar Sah’s wife Savita Kumari was struggling to breathe at a government-run Covid facility in the district’s Maharajganj town, the doctors said they could not help despite there being enough oxygen in the hospital. She needed...
