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01-05-2021
Bureau Report
NEW DELHI/ GIJRAT: A fire in a COVID-19 hospital ward in western India killed 18 patients as the country grappling with the world’s worst outbreak stepped up a vaccination drive for all adults even though some states say they do not have enough jabs.
India on Saturday set yet another daily global record with 401,993 new coronavirus cases, taking its tally to more than 19.1 million. Another 3,523 people died in the past 24 hours, raising the overall fatalities to 211,853, according to the health ministry. Experts believe both figures are an undercount.
The fire broke out in a COVID-19 ward on the ground floor and was extinguished within an hour, police said. The cause was being investigated.
It started around midnight in the intensive care ward of the Patel Welfare Hospital, a designated COVID-19 facility, in Bharuch city, 185km (115 miles) north of state’s main commercial city, Ahmedabad.
“Sixteen patients and two staff members have died in the fire. Twelve of them died due to fire and smoke,” said RV Chudasama, a superintendent of police in Bharuch. “Preliminary investigation shows the fire was caused because of a short circuit”, but Dushyant Patel, a state government official, said leakage from an oxygen cylinder in the intensive care unit started the blaze.
Local news channels showed footage of a hospital ward completely destroyed.
“There was a lot of chaos because of the scale of the fire… Hospital staff rushed my family members out from the ward and we used our car to take them to another hospital,” said Parth Gandhi, whose two relatives, both COVID-19 patients, escaped the disaster.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a tweet he was “pained by the loss of lives due to a fire at a hospital in Bharuch”.
Thirty-one other patients at the Welfare Hospital were rescued by hospital workers and firefighters and their condition was stable, said police officer BM Parmar.
On April 23, a fire in an intensive care unit killed 13 COVID-19 patients in the Virar area on the outskirts of Mumbai.
Faced with an unprecedented surge in cases that has filled hospitals and crematoriums, Modi’s government described the pandemic as a “once-in-a-century crisis”.
Modi held a cabinet meeting on Friday that discussed steps to save the country’s crumbling health system by adding hospital beds, resolving issues in vaccine production, storage and transport of oxygen, and tackling the shortage of essential medicines.
Television images showed a woman gasping for breath in her car while her family looked for a hospital bed on the outskirts of the capital New Delhi.
The 33-year-old woman could not find room at three hospitals and died in the car on Friday, victims reported.
