Once out of stock, Gzb now has 3k remdesivir doses

Ghaziabad: The Ghaziabad health department, which was struggling to provide remdesivir doses to Covid patients during the height of the pandemic in April-May, now has a stock of 3,000 doses of the antiviral injection.
Pharmacists in the district said that as Covid cases were coming down, demand for the injection had been on the wane too. Over the past 15 days, they said, they haven’t sold a single vial of remdesivir to patients’ relatives.
Health officials said they had no option but to keep the stocks. They said that until there were further instructions from the government, these vials could be used during the third wave.
The injections are due to expire in January next year. The situation is a sharp contrast to that in April-May, when people were running pillar to post for the antiviral medicine and social media was flooded with requests from patients’ relatives. Rajiv Tyagi, general secretary of the District Ghaziabad Chemists and Druggists Association, said, “The situation was quite bad then. I alone would get more than 100 calls daily for the injection. People faced a lot of trouble and travelled hundreds of kilometres to Haryana to procure remdesivir. The situation started to improve by the second week of May. But by then, the worst of the wave had started to subside. At present, over 2 lakh doses of this injection are available with the stockists.”
According to official figures, on April 1, the health department had a stock of just 200 doses of remdesivir, which could be given to only 40 patients. Between April 1 and May 31, the department received 6,255 doses, of which 3,395 were provided by the Uttar Pradesh Medical Supplies Corporation Limited, 2,345 by the Meerut division and 315 by a pharmaceutical firm.
Over 50% (3,236) of these were consumed, while 3,019 are left.