Africa faces severe oxygen shortages to treat patients

Africa Is Running Out Of Oxygen As COVID surges, so does demand for oxygen. And oxygen manufacturing plants simply can't keep up. That's bad news not only for severely ill COVID-19 patients but others in need, including newborns. NPR.org

Hospital wards across Uganda are filling with COVID-19 patients as the country faces an aggressive surge in cases. One of the biggest issues have: a serious shortage of oxygen.

Over the last month, the number of daily reported infections has increased tenfold, showing no signs of letting up. Cases have jumped from less than 100 a day in mid-May to 1,584 on June 18^th. "ICU bed capacity is now full, almost at 100%," says Willy Tabu, a physician based in Kampala who helps coordinate Mercy Corps response to the pandemic.

And it's not only beds that are a concern.Tabu says severely ill COVID patients need oxygen, but the supply just isn't there.

Oxygen is being produced. Uganda's 14 largest federal hospitals each have oxygen generating plants and they provide cylinders to smaller hospitals and clinics. But they are struggling to meet the increased demand. There's also a shortage of cylinders to go around, says Tabu — meaning the oxygen plants have to ship the ones they have back and forth to be refilled, and that doesn't happen quickly. ...

"If you don't have oxygen and you don't have a vaccine, this is like a perfect storm for mass fatality," says Leith Greenslade, the coordinator of the Every Breath Counts Coalition, which addresses respiratory issues in low- and middle-income countries.

Greenslade says inadequate supplies of oxygen have been a problem in many parts of the world during this pandemic but the shortages in Africa are acute. While countries like Brazil and India have industrial plants creating oxygen, much of Africa does not. Sierra Leone, for instance, has only two plants for the entire country,

"Prior to the pandemic, most of the hospitals in Africa were not properly equipped to deal with the needs of oxygen for non-COVID patients," Greenslade says.

Severely ill COVID patients on the continent die at rates far higher than anywhere else in the world. A study of COVID mortality in 10 African nations, published last month in the British medical journal The Lancet, found that half of those admitted to intensive care units didn't survive.

It also found that only half of hospitalized COVID patients got access to high-flow oxygen, the most effective delivery system. The West African nation of Sierra Leone has only two functioning medical oxygen plants: one in the capital and one in a remote diamond mining district near the border with Guinea. ...