Covid pandemic ‘uncovered’ oxygen shortages as WHO condemns ‘abject failure’ to develop global healthcare

The coronavirus pandemic has “uncovered” the “abject failure” of the global community to improve healthcare coverage over the past 20 years, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said, amid warnings that poorer countries are still struggling with oxygen supplies.

Despite being two years into the pandemic, health leaders have warned that access to the lifesaving gas is still a major problem in low and middle-income countries.

“Not one month has gone by” without some of these nations experiencing oxygen shortages and related deaths, said Leith Greenslade, the coordinator of the Every Breath Counts Coalition.

This comes despite oxygen being the sufficient sole treatment for 75 per cent of patients admitted to hospital with the virus, according to global health agency Unitaid.

When combined with other factors, such as Russia’s war in Ukraine, these oxygen shortages affect not just coronavirus patients – but also “mothers in childbirth, newborns, the injured, and the elderly with chronic conditions”, Ms Greenslade warned.

These shortages have highlighted the “abject failure” in the past two decades to develop and shore up primary healthcare and universal health coverages across the world, the WHO’s health emergencies programme executive director Michael Ryan said.

“Covid didn’t cause this, Covid uncovered this. Covid laid bare, tore away the bandages from, some very, very old wounds,” Mr Ryan said.

Despite it being an integral tool for treating coronavirus patients, “no one was interested in oxygen”, Mr Ryan claimed.

“I went to meeting after meeting and I spoke about oxygen, and nobody was listening because oxygen wasn’t sexy. It wasn’t new. It wasn’t some technological advance that could be delivered to the world. Oxygen was boring, oxygen was old,” he said.

The comments, reported in the British Medical Journal, came at a briefing of the Access to Covid-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator programme – a global initiative set up in April 2020 to improve equitable access to coronavirus tests, treatments, and vaccines, and to expedite their development.

The initiative – which also houses the Covax vaccine scheme – comprises governments, scientists, businesses, civil society, and philanthropists and health organisations such as the WHO, Wellcome Trust, Unitaid and the World Bank.

The emergence of the coronavirus quickly pushed oxygen supplies to the limit in countries around the world – with Italy becoming one of the first countries to see supplies strained during its brutal first wave ahead of large-scale shortages elsewhere, notably in Peru, Brazil and India, during its unprecedented virus surge last year.

The situation last year prompted a warning from Ms Greenslade that oxygen shortages in dozens of countries threatened the “total collapse” of some nations’ healthcare systems.

With medical oxygen reportedly having accounted for just 1 per cent of global liquid oxygen production, Ms Greenslade asked at the time how such a vital resource could be “locked up in mining, steel, oil and gas” during a public health crisis.

Speaking at the briefing this week, Unitaid’s director of programmes Robert Matiru warned that, “as we speak, more than 20 countries have surging Covid-19 oxygen needs, particularly now in south Asia”, adding: “Who knows what [the situation] will look like in four to five months time?”

Mr Matiru said that “time and time again in the past two years we’ve been caught off guard by not investing in advance and preparing systems to respond effectively”.