Chandigarh: Punjab health minister Balbir Singh Sidhu said on Wednesday that the state government has exhausted its stock of Covishield and Covaxin, but the central government has assured supply of four lakh vaccines on Thursday.
Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh has also written to the Union health and family welfare minister Dr Harsh Vardhan, seeking uninterrupted oxygen supply from the Liquid Medical Oxygen (LMO) suppliers, with at least 120 MT daily allocation for the state, excluding (22 MT) of Punjab quota in supply to PGIMER, Chandigarh. He has reiterated his request for urgent steps for setting up two pending pressure swing adsorption (PSA) plants approved by it two months ago.
Sidhu said, “We need 15 lakh vaccines at a time from the central government to achieve our target of vaccinating 3 lakh persons in a day.” Criticising the Centre for its poor strategy in distribution of vaccines, he said either it is a case of bias against some states or there is a shortage due to less production, but proper monitoring is the Centre’s responsibility.
With the central government firming up a new strategy for distribution of Covid-19 vaccines to states, factoring their requirement and wastage, Sidhu conceded that initially some vials had got wasted due to fear in people’s mind and misinformation spread by opposition parties in Punjab about the vaccines, but the wastage has now come down drastically.
He added that the state government is fully prepared to handle the second Covid wave and has nearly 999 ventilators in various hospitals. There were 48 patients on ventilators in the state on Tuesday. On the issue of oxygen, the health minister said the government has sought release of more supply in the light of the increasing daily cases. He said Faridkot and Jalandhar have oxygen plants, but the central government is yet to sanction the oxygen plants at Patiala and Amritsar. He, however, said that only 480 patients were on oxygen support as on Tuesday.
In his letter to Vardhan, Amarinder said since the main requirement of the state is fulfilled from outside, adherence of supply as per the allocation made by the Centre for all states, including Punjab, is critical to be able to meet the daily requirement. While the capacity for storage of medical oxygen for all healthcare facilities in the state is around 300 MT, daily consumption as per the present case load in Punjab is around 105-110 MT, the CM pointed out, adding that this was expected to further rise to around 150-170 MT in the next two weeks as per the projections of increase in hospital admissions.
He said the Central Control Group on Oxygen had reduced allocation to 82 MT from the week of April 25, which would be grossly insufficient. Moreover, the clubbing of Punjab’s allocation with Chandigarh (22MT) further reduces its supply.
The CM said the biggest constraint is that supply to the manufacturers/distributors and refillers for liquid oxygen is fulfilled by manufacturers from outside the state (Inox, Baddi, HP; Air Liquide Panipat & Roorkee; and Linde, Selaqui, Dehradun) as there is no LMO plant within the state.