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April 25

medical oxygen shortage in India

It's all over the news that there's a big shortage of medical oxygen in India, the lack of which is interfering with covid treatment. Oxygen is being driven around in armed transports and that sort of thing. Does anyone know quite what the bottleneck is? Oxygen itself is plentiful in the atmosphere, purifying and liquifying it in industrial quantities is done all the time, you can get it at welding and scuba shops etc. The shortage has been going on long enough to have spun up manufacturing lines in India and China for whatever is needed, I would have thought, though I thought the same thing of N95 masks. Either way it's not like a shortage of an exotic drug or rare metal. Any idea what's going on? Thanks. 2602:24A:DE47:BB20:50DE:F402:42A6:A17D (talk) 21:01, 25 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The requirements on medical oxygen seem to be more stringent than the requirements on welding oxygen... AnonMoos (talk) 22:16, 25 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder what impurities welding oxygen would have that they couldn't filter out easily. Fwiw I just saw an article saying they are now getting oxygen from steel mills.[1] In fact the quantities involved are quite large, much more than I would have guessed. 2602:24A:DE47:BB20:50DE:F402:42A6:A17D (talk) 23:08, 25 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

One of the problems with using industrial O2 for medical uses is that some of it has trace amounts of hydrocarbons in it from the lubricants used in industrial valves and compressors. Another is low-quality air at the compressor inlet. For use in, say, an oxyacetylene torch, nobody cares if the compressor is sucking in some carbon monoxide from its own exhaust.

The thing is, some industrial O2 might be perfectly fine for medical, but you don't know which tank is good. One time we were having problems with hydrocarbon contamination in some compressed air we were buying and using in a lab experiment, and we thought we would have to buy the more expensive SCUBA air, but instead we got by with an automotive smog tester followed by a Mark 1 Human Nose to weed out the really bad tanks. It might be that O2 that isn't perfect is better than no O2 if you really need O2 to stay alive and they are out of the good stuff. --Guy Macon (talk) 00:54, 26 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It seems likely that the recent very rapid escalation of the requirement would have overwhelmed any existing logistical arrangements, regardless of the potential availability of the 'raw material.' {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.200.135.95 (talk) 10:00, 26 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps they could have been better prepared though, see As coronavirus cases soar, India’s hospitals race to secure badly needed oxygen back in September last year when they were already turning patients away in Mumbai. Alansplodge (talk) 17:33, 26 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note that high-flow oxygen therapy (inna nose) uses a lot more oxygen than if the patient is intubated and on a breathing machine. Of course these are in short upply as well and intubation is discouraged by the WHO and by anyone who knows the survival numbers. --SCIdude (talk) 09:23, 27 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It wasn't until this year that I was able to buy my second ever pack of N95s in the U.S., so I don't know how you can dismiss the shortage so easily. Also, this is like the toilet paper shortage. Of course there's enough given time to adjust, but the fact is in a crisis, there is not enough time to adjust the supply chain. Btw, Kimberly-Clark just reported that their consumer paper products saw a 14% drop in sales last quarter after rising 14% the same time last year, while industry demand fell another 13%. Imagine Reason (talk) 11:26, 26 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't mean to dismiss the N95 shortage, but rather the opposite: I understood how there could be an N95 shortage at the start of the pandemic when demand suddenly shot up and (among other things) the supposed US national stockpile turned out to be empty, but I couldn't understand why the shortage was still happening a year later. Also, if anyone wants N95's, wellbefore.com and safetyemporium.com both have them. I would say shortage is not over (I'll declare the shortage over when the price per mask is comparable to before the pandemic), but you can get them for a few dollars per mask. I have some and am continuing to re-use them, although HCW are now supposed to stop doing that.[2]

Guy Macon: many of your links are quite out of date. 2602:24A:DE47:BB20:50DE:F402:42A6:A17D (talk) 22:11, 26 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The physics of droplet dispersal have not changed since those experiments were performed a year ago. --Guy Macon (talk) 12:40, 27 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You should read up on the daily requirements for the number of respirators needed in a country like the U.S. and the number in its stockpile at the start of the pandemic. Also look into the number sent to China in February as Trump declared that the pandemic would be over by April, and the recommendations of the various pandemic preparedness studies performed by the federal government in the years before, including the team that Trump disbanded in 2019. I don't know why anyone should be surprised why the shortage would last so long. It was predicted soon after the pandemic began that the country was just not ready. Imagine Reason (talk) 00:21, 27 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You can blame government regulations for the low stockpiles:

--Guy Macon (talk) 12:40, 27 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]