The United States Agency for International Development shipped more pallets of equipment to Nepal, to aid in the covid19 wave now under way. The equipment included:
Over the past six months alone, USAID has provided Nepal with COVID-19 testing equipment, oxygen cylinders, pulse oximeters, PPE for health care workers, disinfection supplies, thermometers, arterial blood gas machines, and other life-saving medical equipment. In November 2020, USAID donated 100 ventilators to 51 hospitals throughout Nepal and the National Ambulance Service to aid critically-ill COVID-19 patients. ( from USAID press release May 21 2021)
Press coverage in Nepal was not as overwhelmingly positive as you may think. The newspapers and social media pointed out that what is needed is vials of vaccine.
I agree with them, and some reader here will no doubt point out that Nepal had a year in which to assume that they should do something to mitigate the pandemic when it returned to their country.
Something else that has been happening. In Nepal and throughout South Asia the black market for oxygen has exploded. Reports tell that that rampant price-gouging is a big problem. Its nearly impossible to get a cylinder of the medical variety of oxygen that most people think of as coming in large metal cylinders with green paint on them ( green is the USA color code. In Nepal the oxygen color code is white). Many of of the emergency aid shipments have included filled cylinders of the life-saving gas.
Seattle region, January 2020
Early in the USA experience, I recall one tidbit in the news — seems as though some hospitals in the Seattle region ran out of oxygen. Here in the USA that was simply not thought to be possible, since most hospitals have their own tank of liquid oxygen on the premises. We seem to have corrected the problem. I know this sounds naive, but I would have thought that policymakers around the world would have taken steps to prevent this.
Nepal and India do not need cylinders to be airlifted
The key point is, oxygen is not “mined” like gold or lithium. There are not geographically-placed deposits that can be “owned.” It is a component of the air we breathe, and the technology to produce a purified version of it has been around for more than a hundred years. The person running the generating plant does not an especially complicated technical background.
Here is a six-minute video that explains how they make it:
and with a little sleuthing over the intertubes, you can find companies that manufacture the equipment. There seems to be a company in Delaware that will assemble the components, put them on a pallet, and ship the whole setup pre-assembled, anywhere in the world. They make one they call “military grade,” meaning they can be used by the US Army in setting up field hospitals anywhere you can fly a cargo plane.
I don’t know what they cost, nor do I know how long their factory takes to build one. But of all the supplies, we should not need to be shipping the cylinders themselves, when the only cost actually boil down the oxygen is for the electricity to run the apparatus.
Vaccine?
Yes it’s true that all the countries in the world need vaccine. But I would ask USAID to look into sending over this kind of equipment instead.