Agra’s Shri Paras Hospital has been given a clean chit by the district administration after an enquiry into the incident of a ‘mock drill’ and subsequent death of “22 patients” found that the supposed deaths were not caused due to any mock drill, but due to the severity of Covid-19 infections that the patients were experiencing. Additionally, 22 patients never died at one go at the hospital. The case came to light when a video surfaced of the hospital owner Dr Arinjay Jain allegedly describing a ‘mock drill’ in which oxygen supply was shut down for five minutes in April and 22 patients showed severe hypoxia symptoms.
The Yogi government had launched an inquiry and sealed the hospital, while a case under the Epidemic Diseases Act was registered against the hospital owner. The report by the district administration, however, seems to suggest that 22 patients did not die to a mock drill. In their report, the investigators have found that 16 deaths took place at the hospital concerned between April 15 and 25. All the patients died because their condition was critical or they had severe comorbidities.
There were no ’22 deaths’, and the report states “The assessment of the oxygen (requirement) was the mock drill. We monitored indications of hypoxia and oxygen saturation level and used the winning process so that we could work optimally even with a limited supply. Every patient was monitored at the bedside after which it became clear that of the serious patients, 22 were extremely serious”.
The figure of 22 deaths, therefore, was a figment of imagination.
The hospital was using 149 oxygen cylinders with 20 in reserve on April 25 and 121 cylinders with 15 in reserve on April 26, according to the report. This was found to be adequate for the patients admitted to the hospital at the time. Meanwhile, Ashok Chawla, an Agra resident who lost two family members in the hospital has demanded a CBI enquiry, saying, “We will fight for our loved ones till our last breath. The matter should be investigated by the CBI.”
Who spread the news of 22 patients dying due to the oxygen supply mock drill in Agra’s Paras hospital? Those responsible for such lies, and for misleading the entire nation must be identified and brought to task. The hospital owner, Dr Arinjay Jain earlier told the Indian Express, “We adjusted the bed flow of oxygen of patients just to check what amount was required. Since everyone had been saying that oxygen must be used judiciously, we decided to adjust levels to see if we could use less. We identified 22 patients who required high flow oxygen. We had sleepless nights over oxygen supply and this was our experiment to stabilise supply. We did not cut off oxygen as is being said everywhere. There is no irreversible impact of lowering oxygen supply”.