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Delhi woman travels 400 km in ambulance for ICU bed in Uttarakhand; dies
Reeta Sharma had tested Covid-19 positive and couldn’t find a hospital in the national capital that could spare a ventilator for her.
A 56-year-old Delhi woman travelled more than 400 km in an ambulance to Uttarakhand to be able to get a bed in a private hospital’s intensive care unit but died soon after she was admitted on Thursday.
“The woman was admitted in the hospital around 1 am on Thursday, but she died at about 2.15 am during the treatment,” Deepak Joshi, owner of Jeevan Anmol hospital in Uttarakhand’s Champawat district said.
Reeta Sharma, a resident of Mukherjee Nagar in north Delhi, had recently tested positive to Covid-19. When her condition started deteriorating, her husband Rakesh Sharma took her to several hospitals in the city in search of a hospital bed with a ventilator. That is what doctors had told him that his wife needed.
But he did not find any.
Rakesh Sharma then looked up online for Covid hospitals outside Delhi and found the private hospital in Champawat that said it had a spare ventilator. Joshi said he has two ventilators in his hospital.
Sharma bought an oxygen cylinder for ₹80,000 for the journey and paid another ₹1.5 lakh for an ambulance that agreed to take Reeta Sharma and him to Champawat.
She died a little over an hour after getting the ICU bed that she needed.
Joshi said he informed the local administration about the death and the woman was cremated in accordance with Covid-19 protocol at the district’s Tarakeshwar crematorium on Thursday.
RP Khanduri, chief medical officer of Champawat said he had been informed about the death of the Covid-19 patient from Delhi. “She died during treatment and her body was cremated as per Covid-19 protocol on Thursday by local administration,” he said.
