Health Minister says 900K are on Oxygen support in India

In his briefing, India’s health minister Harsh Vardhan said on Saturday that the country has close to 900,000 people on Oxygen support. The Union minister also said that 1.34 percent patients were availing the facilities of intensive care units and among them 0.39 percent on ventilators. 

The percentage of the patients on oxygen support add up to 3.70 percent. This was the 25th address in the group of ministers (GoM). The group of ministers came together to discuss the pandemic situation of the country and they asserted that 500,000 patients have been admitted to the intensive care units. 

During the briefing it was also added that 170,000 covid-19 patients were on ventilators and since the last four days, the country has witnessed over 400,000 covid-19 cases daily. Other than that, the Union Minister also talked about the increased number of tests saying that earlier 150,000 tests were being done everyday but now it has increased to 250,000 tests daily. 

“Our testing capacity from 15 lakh per day (last meeting on April 9) has been increased to 25 lakh per day right now,” he said. Apart from that, the government official also addressed the fact that there is a huge gap between people who received their first dose of vaccines and those who received the second dose of the covid-19 vaccines. 

He added, “The government has been pursuing this very aggressively with the states and also trying to publicly motivate everyone to get the second dose. We have asked the states to utilise the vaccines given by the Centre in the ratio of 70:30 for the second dose.”

The secretary of the road transport and highway showed faith in the country increasing the supply of oxygen to many of the hospitals. He said that the domestic production of Oxygen has ramped up to 9,4000 MT in a single day from 5,7000 MT in August last year. 

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This year saw a surge in covid-19 cases in the months of March and April and that deeply impacted the healthcare sector. Experts suggest that the impact was far greater than last year as many of the patients were asymptomatic during their initial covid-19 days. The country also saw shortage of many essential resources and Oxygen was one of them.