January 29, 2021 – Southern California hospitals are struggling to get enough oxygen to patients as they weather the COVID-19 surge, the Los Angeles Times reports.
COVID-19 hospitalization rates in L.A. County have come down from their highs of two weeks ago, improving the oxygen pipeline, but hospital administrators and medical suppliers say problems with refill and delivery of oxygen tanks are still hampering the medical response.
It’s partly a hospital infrastructure problem, as some aging and overworked pipes that funnel oxygen to patients have frosted, slowing down or even stopping oxygen transmission.
There’s also not enough concentrators, which extract oxygen from the air, and tanks to meet demand at hospitals or for patients to take home when they’re discharged.
On the distribution side, the number of trucks available to deliver oxygen has been stretched thin.
To deal with the surge in demand, some companies are bringing in medical oxygen from other states — sometimes as far as 1,000 miles away — or increasing production locally, said Rich Gottwald, president of the Compressed Gas Assn. trade group, which represents about 90% of the industrial and medical gas industry.
To help accommodate, California has temporarily loosened restrictions regulating the transport of oxygen, oxygen equipment and other COVID-19 supplies, including the limit on how many hours a truck driver can be on the road. State officials have also set up a task force to address the oxygen supply issue…