Union Health Ministry doesn’t have data on ventilator deaths due to Covid-19: RTI response

The Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare does not have details of ventilator deaths and other information on the usage of the devices, a response to an application under the Right To Information (RTI) Act shows.

NGO NatConnect Foundation sought to know from the Ministry the details of patients put on ventilators during the two waves of Covid and the response was: “No information is available in records of DM Cell, MoHFW with respect to queries raised by you vide your RTI application.”

NatConnect filed its first appeal in response to which Govind Jaiswal, Director, Public Health, confirmed the non-availability of the information sought.

Expressing shock and dismay at this response, NatConnect director B N Kumar asked: “If the ministry does not have the centralised information, who else will have it?”

Kumar said first of all the Ministry took three long months to respond and the reply is totally unsatisfactory. He, therefore, filed an appeal with the Ministry seeking details.

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“I wanted to know the details from two perspectives – one to know the preparedness of the health services machinery in the wake of the continuous Covid-19 fury and second to know the effectiveness of the ventilator treatment in various States and UTs,” Kumar stated in a statement.

For instance, the AIIMS Bhopal reported a ventilator survival rate of 25% during April-December 2020 and 28% during January-April 2021. The AIIMS Bhubaneswar recorded higher by a few notches: 42% ventilator survival during the first wave and 61% during the second wave.

These responses came after the Union Health Ministry apparently forwarded the NatConnect query to these hospitals.

The national data is very important as it will help plan for the future, Kumar said. “This is also because we had several deaths due to lack of ventilator facilities and oxygen supply,” he said and recalled that a journalist breathed last on a wheelchair in a Hyderabad hospital despite all efforts, including a minister’s intervention.

He expressed the hope that the central ministry would collage the data at least now and plan for the third wave which is feared to impact the children who are yet to be vaccinated. Most of the adult population is being covered under the current aggressive vaccination drives across the country free of cost as well as paid modes.