Meerut: The administration in Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut is probing allegation that a private hospital admitted four times more patients than it was allowed during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic and supplied them with inadequate oxygen leading to “25-30 deaths” every day. The allegation was made by Devendra Kumar, an insider who has been working with the hospital for the last 11 years.
Taking the accusations seriously, district magistrate K Balaji has ordered a probe by a panel.

“We have constituted a team of additional district magistrate (ADM, administration) and assistant chief medical officer (ACMO) which will look into the allegations,” he said. Attempts to contact the owner of the hospital went unanswered. In his video statement, Kumar alleged that the hospital was getting limited oxygen cylinders which were meant to cater to the need of its fixed quota of 50 patients. “District magistrate had authorized the intake of only 50 Covid-19 patients. So we were getting our quota of 300 oxygen cylinders. But the hospital admitted 193-194 patients between April 10 and May 15. And for all of them, we would have required at least 800 cylinders every 24 hours. So -- to compensate for this-- the usual pressure of 4.1 was reduced to 1.5, resulting in 25-30 deaths daily,” Kumar said.

Kumar also claimed that the hospital management threatened him “against sharing this with anyone outside”. “I kept quiet for some time. But when they continued doing this, I spoke to the hospital owner. But he misbehaved and threatened me,” Kumar said. Meanwhile, the family members who lost their loved ones in the hospital corroborated the claims of staffer Kumar. “I got my mother admitted in the hospital on April 21 and she died a week later. On the night of April 25, they had announced that just 10 minutes of oxygen was left and attendants should shift their patients to another hospital.

A ruckus had ensued and attendants asked why they admitted patients when they did not have required capacity,” Ashutosh Johri (30) said. His mother, Santosh (57), died on April 28. “Most of the fatalities occurred between 3 and 5 in the night,” Johri claimed. Manoj Joshi, another Meerut resident who lost his cousin, Naveen Bansla (34) at the hospital on May 2 said, “He (cousin) used to be perfectly fine during the day. But his oxygen level used to suddenly dip at around 3 in the night. Now the reality is out in public that they used to actually cut the flow.”

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