Buckling under pressure to bridge the gap between the demand and supply of medical oxygen and sort out the related logistical issues, the State government has set up a ‘State Oxygen War Room’ (SOWR) and is in the process of ensuring similar facilities in the districts.
These ‘war rooms’ have been tasked with procuring oxygen, arranging its transportation to COVID-designated facilities and ensuring safe storage for use in the coming months.
The sharp spike in the number of COVID patients in the need of oxygen support for survival has prompted the government to accord a top priority to augmenting the production and supply infrastructure and setting up the ‘war rooms’ to ensure proper coordination that is crucial for preventing fatalities.
According to an official release, the SOWR and DOWRs will ensure that the required medical oxygen is dispatched to the district headquarters hospitals and other major COVID facilities and refills are done properly in time. The responsibility of pooling up oxygen and allocating it to the districts rests with the SOWR, which is also mandated to keep a watch on the usage of the lifesaving gas.
Nodal officers
The SOWR is headed by IAS officers M.T. Krishna Babu and S. Shan Mohan. They will be assisted by nodal officers of Industries, Medical & Health, Transport, Revenue & Disaster Management (R&DM), Police and IT Departments.
Each of these departments have been entrusted with specific responsibilities to accomplish the larger task of making enough quantities of oxygen available to hospitals without any hindrance.
The Industries Department has also been asked to procure oxygen from all possible sources and even get the closed units reopened for producing as much oxygen as possible, and more importantly get B and D type (industrial) cylinders converted into medical oxygen cylinders.
Green channel
The role of R&DM, Transport and Police Departments is ensure smooth transportation of oxygen containers and cylinders and to source the life-saving gas from Karnataka, Odisha and Tamil Nadu and from the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant (VSP), which is a major contributor of oxygen. The Police Department will be facilitating the oxygen transportation by opening green channels wherever needed.
The Transport Department will get the oxygen containers and cylinders moving on trains and air, if the situation warrants. As far as the IT Department is concerned, it will play a crucial part too by tracking the oxygen consignments through GPS and GIS mapping.