Alarmed by the acute shortage of medical-grade oxygen which is used for the treatment of critical Covid-19 patients and also in other cases of respiratory illness, local legislator- Geeta Jain has requested the state government authorities to help the Mira Bhayandar Municipal Corporation (MBMC) in replicating the Pressure Swing Absorption (PSA) technology which has been successfully adopted by the district administration of Gadhinglaj town in Kolhapur district to generate oxygen directly from atmospheric air.
In her letter to Chief Minister- Uddhav Thakeray, the legislator highlighted the alarming upward trend in the coronagraph of the twin-city which had led to shortage of much needed Remdesivir injections and medical-grade oxygen which was causing inconvenience and disruption in treatment. Jain stressed upon the need of the technology to resolve the acute crisis of oxygen faced by almost all public and private health care facilities which were involved in treating Covid-19 patients in the twin-city.
Involving a simple technology which incurs low costs, the PSA plants can separate and purify oxygen generated from the environment and provide it to patients. Going by the huge surge in the number of active cases, around 800 to 900 cylinders are needed per day while treating critically ill patients at various Covid-19 healthcare facilities in the twin-city, officials said. With 372 additions the total number of cumulative positive patients has reached to 34,972 and the active cases reported by the MBMC have crossed the 4,000 mark.
The death toll has mounted to 879. Apart from Kolhapur, the PSA system is being set up in Jalna district and also in Nagpur. Private doctors associated with the Mira Bhayandar unit of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) had recently come forward with a proposal to the MBMC to set up an oxygen plant.
