Ventilators- Life Savers In Kashmir

Ventilators- Life Savers In Kashmir

Shakeel Maqbool

 

Kashmir valley has a population of 70 lakh and it has 97 ventilators. The government is procuring around 100 more. New York city has a population of 80 lakh and its city mayor Bill de Blasio says he needs 15,000 more. The comparison tells a scary story of the sorry state of affairs where we are in. 

 

Countries around the world are racing against time to procure ventilators. Car manufacturers, rail manufacturers, all manufacturers who can; are trying to manufacture ventilators. Even in India the Integral Coach Factory (ICF) in Chennai, the makers of Train 18 (India’s first electric semi-high speed train), is attempting to manufacture ventilators.

 

India lacks an official figure on the number of ventilators it has. Rough estimates peg it at around 40,000. This is around 1 ventilator for 32000 people. With the 97 ventilators in valley, we have around 1 ventilator per 70000 people.  In UK they had around 7000 ventilators for around 7 crore people which is 1 ventilator per 10000. They have just ordered for 10000 more ventilators and will soon take the ratio down to 1 ventilator per 3000 people, with more ventilators in the pipeline. Even Pakistan next door has declared they are procuring 10000 more to take the total to 12000 ventilators which makes roughly 1 ventilator per 16000 people.

With a population of 70 lakh, if the Kashmir valley wants to reach the level of UK, we need 2300 ventilators. Even to reach the capacity of Pakistan, we need roughly 450 ventilators. But how many are we going to have with all the procurement going smoothly is 200 to 250 ventilators. The situation is desperate.

 

 

But why are ventilators so important in Covid crises. Simply because they save lives. A good percentage of Covid patients suffer from respiratory failures and need ventilators to stay alive. Now if there is a large number of such patients and the ventilators are just not enough, patients who could have recovered will simply die. One of the most obvious ways to avoid a shortage of ventilators, is to reduce the numbers of people catching the disease in the first place. That means following all the health advice, including social distancing and lock downs. But we need to be prepared for the worst. Community transmission has already been observed in the Kashmir valley and often the viral spread explodes in a few weeks.

 

According to most experts Covid is here to stay till we get the vaccine, which looks atleast one year away. Personal Protective Equipments, lockdowns, hygiene awareness are all golden measures but they may only delay the spread. We need to focus on the curative aspects besides the preventive measures. Like it or not ventilators are going to be the lynchpin of curative efforts. 

 

Ventilators are in short supply. They take at least a month to deliver and get installed and that too if they are available. We have got to have some contingency planning for acquiring, installing and operating them; in case there is an explosion of Covid in the community and that is not farfetched at all.

 

However ventilators are not easy machines to handle and operate. They need well trained staff and often invasive surgical procedures to put patients on them. A ventilator alone cant do anything, it needs an ICU ecosystem to operate. Be that as it may, there is no going away from the fact that we need ventilators and we need more and more of them desperately. We also need to put the rest of the pieces in their ecosystem in place in order for them to function. Ventilators simply save lives; tens and hundreds of them.

 

 

Shakeel Maqbool is a Civil Servant,

Central Civil Services, Government of India