GURUGRAM: IT was a shocking sight: families of Covid victims enter a Gurgaon hospital only to find that no doctor or staff is in attendance; they enter an ICU to find body after body but there is no health staff on the premises.
Livid relatives argue with policemen and ask how doctors can be allowed to desert their patients. They assert that the staff abandoned the ICU patients and fled after the hospital ran out of oxygen!
The chilling clip has gone viral. For the record, six Covid patients died on Friday night at the Kriti Hospital in Gurgaon - the day the videos were taken -- reportedly due to oxygen shortage. Three of them were in the ICU.
The videos show relatives running amok in wards, finding not a doctor or staff member, just empty desks. "Neither the doctor is here, nor the chemist... no one at the reception. There is not even a guard," says a voice.
"How can you allow doctors to run away like this? Only someone who has lost a loved one will understand how we feel," said a man to two policemen who had apparently just arrived.
NDTV cites family members who blamed the hospital for oxygen shortage and negligence. "My nephew died. I brought three cylinders on my own for him, but they finished within minutes and he died. There was no more oxygen," said one relative in a video shot by journalists a day later.
Another lost his brother. "My brother who was a very fit 40-year-old man died. The hospital could never give us any clarity on the oxygen situation,’’ he adds, reports NDTV’s news portal.
The hospital administration says the doctors were in the building that day, "hiding in the canteen" for fear of being attacked by families over the lack of oxygen, points out a relative.
Hospital Director Swati Rathore told NDTV that the hospital had informed every government official from 2 pm that day that they were about to run out of oxygen.
"We had informed relatives of the patients 4 pm onwards to shift their patients due to the oxygen crisis. But no help came and there were six casualties around 11 pm," Dr Rathore said.
She claimed she asked her staff to hide in the canteen to save their own lives as six days previously (April 24) attendants of other patients had violently assaulted their staff and an FIR had been registered by the hospital.
"I feared that my staff would lose their lives this time. The staff never left the hospital that night. They hid temporarily to save their lives," said the hospital director, adds the NDTV portal.
The Gurgaon administration claims that the hospital was not registered as a Covid facility and an inquiry was on into the deaths.
