UDUPI: The demand for oxygen cylinders is soaring in Udupi district. Hospitals which needed five to six cylinders a day now need about 50. The demand is also dynamic, depending on the number of patients with low oxygen saturation level getting admitted to hospital.Srinivas Shanbhag, proprietor of a firm dealing with oxygen cylinders in Kundapur, told TNIE that hospitals which needed five or six cylinders daily before the pandemic, now needs about 50 cylinders of 7 cubic metre on a daily basis. As a result, the price of a cylinder increased from `350 to `500. Refilling of cylinders is done in Mangaluru, and transportation cost pushes up the price by `80 to `100 per cylinder, depending on the agency supplying it.
Udupi DC G Jagadish has instructed suppliers of oxygen cylinders in the district to stop catering to industrial units as hospitals need them in large numbers to save lives. Only one private hospital in Udupi district — Kasturba Hospital, Manipal — has a liquid oxygen plant of 20,000-litre capacity. Dr Avinash Shetty, Medical Superintendent, Kasturba Hospital, Manipal, told TNIE that liquid oxygen supply ensures that the hospital does not depend on cylinders only.
‘’Cylinders are used as back-up and in wards where there is no centralised oxygen supply,’’ he said. The District Government Hospital, Ajjarakad, Udupi, did not have a liquid oxygen plant till now. Before the pandemic, the hospital needed about 15 oxygen cylinders on a daily basis, but now, the requirement is about 50 cylinders per day, hospital sources said.
The health department is now setting up a 6,000-litre capacity liquid oxygen plant near the District Government Hospital. Udupi district surgeon Dr Madhusudhan Nayak told TNIE that the plant will be ready in a week or two.