AccScience Publishing / GHES / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/ghes.2023
REVIEW

Medical oxygen production, supply, and infrastructure augmentation during the COVID-19 pandemic in India: A narrative review

Anjori Agrawal1 Kapil Singh2 Ashwani Verma3*
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1 Programme Management Unit-Medical Oxygen, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), Delhi, New Delhi, India
2 National Public Health Surveillance Project, World Health Organization, Delhi, New Delhi, India
3 Department of Pharmacy and Population Health Informatics, School of Pharmaceutical and Populations Health Informatics, DIT University, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India
Submitted: 12 October 2023 | Accepted: 13 March 2024 | Published: 10 July 2024
© 2024 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

According to the World Health Organization, the primary symptoms of COVID-19 include fever, cough, and fatigue, while more serious cases present with dyspnea (difficulty breathing) and chest pain. The medical use of oxygen therapy is a common life support treatment for numerous diseases at multiple levels of health care in India. An abrupt spike in medical oxygen demand (nearly 100 – 200 fold) has been observed in regions such as South America, Africa, and Asia, including India. Governments of the respective countries have implemented policy decisions to tackle medical oxygen shortage during the pandemic. In this narrative review, we describe and summarize the actions taken by the Indian government to manage the medical oxygen requirement during the deadly COVID-19 waves in India. Searches were conducted on PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar databases, and websites of various ministries and departments of the Government of India, covering the period from January 2020 to January 31, 2023. Qualitative data were extracted using pre-defined themes from published documents related to medical oxygen supply during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Indian context. This narrative review summarizes the state of medical oxygen during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on medical oxygen production, supply, infrastructure augmentation, pressure swing adsorption plants, capacity building, web application, and monitoring mechanisms. The 76th World Health Assembly has also adopted the Access to Medical Oxygen Resolution to prevent deaths and ensure that no country faces an oxygen shortage, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords
Oxygen
Medical oxygen
COVID-19
Pressure swing adsorption plant
Oxygen storage
Funding
None.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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Global Health Economics and Sustainability, Electronic ISSN: 2972-4570 Published by AccScience Publishing