With COVID-19 cases going up and hospitals witnessing more admissions of people requiring oxygen support, private hospitals anticipate an imminent crisis.
Of the 40-odd private hospitals that are treating COVID-19 patients, four major hospitals alone require about 12 metric tonnes (MT) of medical oxygen a day in the current scenario.
According to officials in the know of the requirement at the district administration, the total requirement for all the hospitals was about 20 MT a day.
Sources said that the district received a consignment of five MT of oxygen from Salem and another consignment of 15 MT from Sriperumbudur on Wednesday. These were allocated to hospitals that were in dire need of oxygen.
The consignments reached Coimbatore when oxygen stocks at a few private hospitals were about to be exhausted.
The current crisis has hit smaller hospitals which were depending on a single supplier for medical oxygen before the pandemic, said a senior doctor. Such hospitals are now seeing erratic supply of oxygen, that too with the intervention of the district administration.
Meanwhile, officials with the Health Department said that supply of oxygen to major government hospitals namely the Coimbatore Medical College Hospital and the Government Medical College and ESI Hospital was stable.
District Collector S. Nagarajan was closely monitoring the situation and taking proactive measures to ensure that patients are not affected by oxygen shortage in any of the hospitals in Coimbatore, said a doctor from the management of a private hospital.
