Fire kills 18 in India hospital intensive Care
Fire killed 18 people in India hospital intensive care including two health workers in the western Indian state of Gurajat.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was pained by the loss of lives due to a fire at a hospital in Bharuch.
A superintendent of police in Bharuch, R.V. Chudasama said, “Sixteen patients and two staff members have died in the fire. Twelve of them died due to fire and smoke.
“Preliminary investigation shows the fire was caused because of a short circuit,” he added.
The fire started around midnight in a COVID-19 ward on the ground floor and of the Patel Welfare Hospital in Bharuch city, 115 miles (185 km) south of the state’s main commercial city, Ahmedabad.
A state government official, Dushyant Patel said, leakage from an oxygen cylinder in the intensive care unit started the blaze.
Parth Gandhi, whose two relatives both COVID-19 patients escaped the disaster said, “There was a lot of chaos because of the scale of the fire, hospital staff rushed my family members out from the ward and we used our car to take them to another hospital.”
India’s healthcare system is struggling to cope with the coronavirus crisis, which has killed 211,853 people and infected more than 19 million.
A dozen people were reported killed after a fire in a hospital treating COVID-19 patients in a suburb of Mumbai on April 23.
Earlier 22 patients died at a public hospital in Maharashtra where Mumbai is located when oxygen supplies ran out due to a leaking tank.
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