The controversial oxygen debate on Covid India: A thread. Though I live outside India, I have family in India and am writing this as people are losing loved ones and are genuinely outraged. Yet we must go by facts though when we lose our loved ones it is natural to be...
...emotional. While there are some who point to data that worrying signs were already showing up in Feb /March and government should have picked up signals should surely be listened to and lessons learned, it was far from black and white. With India's economy battered, the...
...government had to a balancing act between building business confidence and putting more restrictions and where to do spend resources on. Plus unlike other nations , India was not hit by a second wave in November to Dec and some policy makers relied perhaps too much on their...
...intuition that even if there was a second wave, it will be a small one. Look at this nature article , even they are baffled by the severity of India's second wave ( may be election rallies and Religious festivals did not also help). nature.com/articles/d4158… ....
...now to the oxygen issue. The reason for the shortage isn’t supply, it’s getting oxygen to where it’s needed. Pandemic has hit us once in a 100 years, similarly, nobody expected the requirement for oxygen to move such large distances to happen. Most factories that produce....
...oxygen in India are located in the eastern part of the country—more than a thousand miles from major cities like New Delhi and Mumbai. Inox group has been able to ramp up its oxygen production from 1,800 tons to 2,300 tons a day over the past few weeks. One of the biggest...
...obstacles is that oxygen is not so easy to transport. Tanks of compressed gases can only travel by roads or trains and cannot be flown on planes. now these tanks have to travel farther than ever before to keep up with surging demand in the states in north and west India. ...
...Plus the cryogenic tanks that hold compressed oxygen cannot be manufactured quickly. Each tank takes about four to six months to produce. So there was no magic wand- pandemics overwhelm system. Balance pls. Thanks to Forbes article: forbes.com/sites/aayuship…
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People will have strong opinions on this thread on both sides. The outrage is justified. Yet I still maintain that most commentators( not the one below, he is impartial and argues with data) are in an unprincipled way claiming that the severity of the second wave was fully...
...predictable. It simply was not. Though all of us would like all policy decisions be based on pure data, we all know that is neither the case in highly developed nations nor in India. Sure in India, we are behind the curve in general in basing our public policy on pure...
...data, but that is just a matter of degree. Plus that is pointing to a gap in technocrats( who should watch these data based graphs)- politician feedback and execution loop and is a general lack of institutional governance malaise in India and is not a ‘BJP’ or ‘Modi’ ...