On Thursday, Parekh Hospital in Ahmedabad, which has a MoU with Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation for treating Covid-19 patients, had to transfer seven patients to the government-run civil hospital at Sola when it ran out of oxygen. (Representational)

The Gujarat government notification on Thursday regularising the supply and circulation of medical oxygen from production units across the state came after a scare faced by Covid-19 hospitals in Ahmedabad and Vadodara over the last fortnight over severe shortage of oxygen.

Alarm bells first rang when nodal officer at Vadodara’s Gujarat Medical Education and Research Society-run (GMERS) Dr Shital Mistry, wrote to the state health and drug control departments about the crisis it had been facing since September 2.

On Thursday, Parekh Hospital in Ahmedabad, which has a MoU with Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation for treating Covid-19 patients, had to transfer seven patients to the government-run civil hospital at Sola when it ran out of oxygen. The hospital has a private tie-up for medical oxygen supply with one Cosmic Agency which was unable to meet the demand. An AMC health official also reiterated that similar shortages have been reported from several private hospitals in the past few days.

Additional Director of Medical Education Dr Raghavendra Dixit said Covid-19 has raised the demand for oxygen by as much as five times in the state. Gujarat has four oxygen manufacturing giants — Lynde India, Inox India, Air Liquid and Sriram Oxygen.