A nightmare on repeat - India is running out of oxygen again
The hospital's medical director said a severe shortfall had slowed the flow of oxygen to 25 of the sickest patients, who needed a high , stable supply.
The tragedy came at the top of every week where several major hospitals in Delhi have repeatedly compared to running out of oxygen, which may help patients with the virus who need support with their breathing stay alive.
On Tuesday, it took a desperate public plea from the chief minister and an intervention from the supreme court for the Indian central government to organise a late night refill.
An oxygen tanker eventually received Sir Ganga Ram hospital on Friday morning, shortly after a dire warning that 60 more patients were on the verge of death.
But India's rising wave of cases is pushing its healthcare system to the brink - from the country's richest cities to its remotest corners.
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A scramble to seek out supply
Some governments did. The southern state of Kerala increased supply by monitoring demand closely and planning for an increase in cases. Kerala now has surplus oxygen that it's sending to other states.
But Delhi and a few other states don't have their own oxygen plants and are counting on imports.
The Supreme Court has weighed in, asking Prime Minister Narendra Modi's administration for a national Covid plan that addresses the oxygen crunch.
The federal health ministry had invited bids for brand spanking new oxygen plants in October last year - quite eight months after the start of pandemic in India. Of the 162 that were sanctioned, only 33 are installed thus far - 59 are going to be installed by the top of April and another 80 by the top of May, the ministry has said.
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The scramble to extend supply points to the shortage of any emergency plan.
Liquid oxygen, pale blue and very cold, with a temperature of around -183C, may be a cryogenic gas which will only be stored and transported in special cylinders and tankers.
About 500 factories in India extract and purify oxygen from air and send it to hospitals in liquid form. Most of it's supplied through tankers.
Major hospitals usually have their own tank where oxygen is stored then piped on to beds. Smaller and temporary hospitals believe steel and aluminium cylinders.
Oxygen tankers often queue outside a plant for hours and it takes about two hours to fill one tanker. It takes several hours more for these tankers to visit various towns within or across states.
The tankers even have to follow a selected regulation - no quite 25mph (40km/h) - and that they often don't travel within the night to avoid accidents.
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The head of 1 of India's biggest oxygen suppliers has said a part of the struggle has been getting oxygen from eastern India, where supply in industrial states like Orissa and Jharkhand is high, to western or northern India like Maharashtra or Delhi, where cases are rising fast.
And the demand for oxygen at individual facilities is unpredictable, making it difficult to measure a hospital's requirement and adequately get supply where it's needed.
"Not every patient needs an equivalent amount of oxygen for an equivalent duration. what percentage patients need oxygen changes by hour during a hospital," said Dr Om Shrivastav, an infectious diseases expert at a Mumbai hospital.
"We are taking all the care we will . But I've not seen anything like this. i feel nobody here has."
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