At Ganga Ram: Desperate cries and an overflowing mortuary

New Delhi: All that could be heard outside the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital's Covid emergency ward on Friday morning was the inconsolable cries of a mother who had lost her 30-year-old son and daughter and sons who had lost their father in a swift moment in the dead of the night. When the Medical Director of the hospital had sent out the initial message on Friday morning, he had said that 25 of their most critical patients had died in a span of 24 hours due to the oxygen crisis the hospital is facing.

And as the hospital kept losing its patients throughout the day, relatives of patients who lost their lives, and were present in the ward, described horrific scenes inside the wards.

Param, wearing a pink polo shirt and shorts, sitting on the curb outside the hospital's mortuary, took out his phone before he started talking. "I can show you what it was like at night. My father was fine till 4 am in the morning. And then suddenly his condition worsened."

Param's father, 57-year-old Shyam Bihari was declared dead around 5 am on Friday.

Shyam's nephew, who was now holding Param as he howled, said that they were with Shyam when they saw the oxygen drop. He said, "Something happened suddenly and the level started dropping and we didn't know what to do. Many were shouting for doctors to do something." Shyam had been receiving treatment at the hospital since Monday morning, Param said.

Throughout Thursday, the hospital had put up SOS messages and even put up a poster on the front door of its Covid emergency ward that said: "Very limited supply of oxygen available". And by Friday morning, the mortuary, originally meant for six bodies at a time, was carrying 20-25 bodies, many of them lined up next to each other on the floor of the mortuary.

One mortuary worker, who was helping the bodies into the hearses, said he had already seen seven to eight bodies come into the mortuary between 7 am and 11:35 am. "You can see what the situation is, there is no more space. So we are waiting for more ambulances/hearses to arrive so that the existing bodies can be sent back.

By this time, a woman broke down in front of the mortuary, looking for her father's body. Her father, Ashok Arora (70) had died on Thursday afternoon around 3:30 pm, when almost 20 hospitals in the city were starving for oxygen. But they were yet to receive the body. Arora's niece, who was also there, said, "We don't know what exactly happened. He was admitted four to five days ago at the hospital and was being treated there before he passed.

Yet another victim was the crying mother of a 30-year-old man who had walked into the hospital but had died within one and half hours. Satish Bharti was a manager at a patent company and lived with his parents and his younger brother in Tilak Nagar. When they finally managed to get to Ganga Ram on Friday around 9 am, Bharti already had laboured breathing and was struggling to inhale, his younger brother said, desperately trying to control his mother from falling to the floor in grief. "He did not have corona. We had tested RT-PCR, just four to five day ago. We knew we had to test because he had slight fever and body ache. But the test was negative so we ruled that out. Suddenly, today (Friday) morning he got very sick and we brought him here. At 10:30 am, the doctors came out and told us he was dead.

The seating area where Bharti's mother was crying was in between two of Ganga Ram's Covid emergency wards and was occupied by family members of patients who had lost their lives. Some making frantic calls to let others know about what had happened and some other staring blankly at the floor beneath them as an elderly woman lay on a stretcher, gasping for air, waiting to be admitted inside.

According to several doctors and ward workers, the casualty ward has a capacity of 12 patients but on Friday afternoon, there were at least 30-35 patients, sharings, beds, stretchers and benches inside the ward, according to ward boy Amit.

Speaking of what had happened on Thursday, he said, "All of the doctors were trying so desperately. We could not do much. It is a terrible situation in the wards and even now there is a shortage of oxygen in the hospital."

"I'm just tired," Amit said, adding that he had just seen two more people die in the casualty ward before he had stepped out for a tobacco break. In the parallel ward, another healthcare worker, Varun said the situation was the same in his ward but that it had by Friday afternoon come under control.