Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya told Parliament on Friday that only Punjab reported deaths owing to a lack of oxygen during the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic in India earlier this year. Mandaviya was reacting to charges made by the opposition that the Centre withheld the true number of deaths in the second wave.
During Question Hour in the Lower House, he responded to a question by saying that the Centre had written to 19 states three times asking for data on mortality caused by a lack of oxygen, but only Punjab had responded.
The minister claimed that the shortage of oxygen’ has sparked a lot of political debate.
According to the health minister, the Centre sent three letters to the states between July 26 and July 30 asking for their Covid-19 death data. The minister said there had been a lot of politics on ‘shortage of oxygen’.
“On August 21, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Daman and Diu, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Assam, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Puducherry, Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Nagaland, Sikkim, Tripura, Jharkhand, and Himachal Pradesh responded to our request,” Mandaviya stated. “Only Punjab said in writing that we are investigating four suspected deaths due to an oxygen shortage.”
Mandaviya claimed in a written answer that the last email to the states was issued on November 29. “Punjab and Arunachal Pradesh are the only states that have responded,” he said. “Punjab has emailed that four suspected deaths have happened in one hospital in the Amritsar area owing to a lack of oxygen.”
The Centre maintained during the Parliament’s Monsoon Session in July that states had not specifically reported any deaths due to oxygen shortages during the second wave. After receiving backlash for its rejection, it requested statistics on the deaths from the states.
The Delhi government stated in August that it had not received a letter from the Centre requesting information on mortality caused by a lack of oxygen in the national capital. However, a day later, the Union minister tweeted a copy of the Centre’s letter to Delhi.
The Union health minister stated that some leaders did not stop politics even while the country was experiencing oxygen shortages while speaking in the Lok Sabha on Friday.
The minister added that the Centre had told the states that deaths due to the shortage of oxygen must be reported. “Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said at a chief ministers’ meeting that there was no need to hide the number of deaths,” Mandaviya said.
Mandaviya asserted that the Centre had made every effort to guarantee that sufficient oxygen was supplied and that when demand increased during the second wave, the supply was increased.
Meanwhile, the health minister informed the House that the Centre had provided increased funding to each district hospital to help them prepare for the next pandemic wave.
However, it was also noticed earlier that the Centre had already attempted to minimize the oxygen shortage that struck India during the deadly second wave of Covid-19. It was discovered that the situation was so critical that hospitals sent out SOS warnings about depleting oxygen supplies, and patients’ attendants waited in long queues in the heat to have their oxygen cylinders filled. The situation was also recognized by the courts. It is startling to learn now that in the second wave, only Punjab has seen deaths due to a shortage of oxygen.
