Pregnant women, children, doctors dying: says IMA
New Delhi, May11 (KMS) : In India, at least 11 COVID-19 patients died due to a problem in oxygen supply inside the intensive care unit (ICU) in the government-run Ruia Hospital at Tirupati in Andhra Pardesh
There was a five-minute lag in reloading the oxygen cylinder that caused the pressure to drop, resulting in the deaths in Tirupati late on Monday night, Chittoor district Collector M Hari Narayanan said.
Meanwhile, the pain and suffering of the relatives of the patients who are admitted; let them hear their desperate pleas for medicines and oxygen and ventilators and ICU beds; the cries of the kith and kin of doctors and nurses who are being eaten by the pandemic.’
Dr J A Jayalal is president of the Indian Medical Association which has sent a letter to the Indian health ministry to ‘wake up’.
The IMA — a pan-India voluntary organisation with a membership of 350,000 doctors — has lost 126 doctors to the second wave and 736 doctors to the first wave.
“Pregnant women are dying, young children are dying, doctors are dying, nurses are dying; the elderly are dying,” Dr Jayalal tells Prasanna D Zore/Rediff.com in the first part of a revealing interview.
You have written a letter to the Indian health ministry and suggested it ‘wake up’ and mitigate challenges’. What kind of inadequacies do you find in the health ministry’s handling of the COVID-19 second wave?
The Indian Medical Association has suggested implementation of a complete, nationwide lockdown for 15 days. But the Modi government doesn’t seem to be in favour of this suggestion.
We had also asked for free vaccination for all Indians irrespective of their age brackets.
All the poor people in the 18-44 age groups may not have enough money to spend on the vaccines and they might opt out of getting vaccine shots, thereby putting them at risk of infections. By extension, they can then expose more people to the risk of infection.