New Delhi: The UP government has given a clean chit to a private hospital in Agra, whose owner had allegedly claimed in an audio clip that the hospital conducted a “mock drill” on patients in its ICU, amid an acute shortage of medical oxygen during the second COVID-19 wave. From the audio of the clip, it appeared that the ‘mock drill’ was conducted to see what would happen if the hospital ran out of oxygen.
Arinjay Jain, the owner of Shree Paras Hospital, can be purportedly heard saying in the 1.5-minute audio clip from April 28: “We were told that even the chief minister cannot get oxygen, so start discharging patients. Modi Nagar is dry. We started counseling families. Some were willing to listen but the others said they would not leave. I said ok let’s do a mock drill. We will find out who will die and who will survive. So we did that at 7 am. A mock drill was done. No one knows. Then we identified 22 patients. We realised they would die. This was done for 5 minutes. They started turning blue.”
As the clip made headlines, Jain said his statements were misinterpreted. He said the hospital never cut off supply to the patients, but was trying to assess which patients needed high-flow of oxygen.
Following outrage over the alleged deaths later due to the exercise, the state government had ordered an enquiry into the incident. The incident is reported to have occurred on the morning of April 26, and the video was made on April 28.
When the video of Jain was circulated, some reports had said that 22 patients had died during the ‘mock drill’, though the owner himself and the district administration denied this number. On April 26 and 27, seven COVID-19 deaths were reported at the hospital, Agra’s district magistrate had said.
The committee of investigators, according to India Today, said they found that 16 deaths took place at the hospital between April 15 and 25, but that none of them were due to the mock drill. The report found that 14 of the 16 patients had some comorbidity, and the reports of two remaining patients showed high HRCT severity scores (infection in chest) and inflammatory indicators.
Some other news reports said that all these 16 deaths occurred on April 26 alone.
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The committee also added that none of the patients’ oxygen supply was cut off and the “cause of deaths was advanced disease and comorbidities”, the news report said.
“It was also found during the inquiry that attendants of some patients had reached the hospital with oxygen arranged from alternative sources,” India Today quoted the committee as saying.
The committee in its report, however, quoted the owner of the hospital Jain as saying that “oxygen stock was adequate” for the patients admitted there. But according to NDTV, none of the complaints by the family members of the patients who died were included in the report.
“It is completely untrue that patients died. No mock drill was conducted after cutting off oxygen supply. Nobody’s oxygen supply was cut off and there is no evidence of this. The rumour is misleading, otherwise there would have been 22 deaths at 7 am on April 26,” NDTV reported, citing the committee’s report, which quoted Jain.
“The hospital had oxygen, but there were issues with future supply. Oxygen assessment was the mock drill. We monitored symptoms of hypoxia and oxygen saturation levels to assess how to function if oxygen supply is limited. We conducted a bedside analysis of every patient and found 22 of the admitted patients to be in very serious condition,” Jain told the committee, as per the news report.
According to the Indian Express, officials found the hospital guilty of spreading “fake information”. The hospital discharged patients citing lack of oxygen even though it had enough supply, the probe found and action will be taken under relevant sections of the Epidemic Act.
Three of the four members of the investigating committee are from SN Medical College – Dr Trilok Chandra Pipal, head of the anaesthesia department; Dr Balvir Singh, head of medicine, and Dr Richa Gupta from the forensic department. The fourth member is Dr P.K. Sharma, the additional chief medical officer of Agra.