Oxygen Shortage Deaths
We are recording deaths due to the lack of oxygen, shortage of oxygen, or denial of oxygen in hospitals during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India. The deaths recorded are based on reports from newspapers and news media in English and regional languages, social media, and networks of volunteers working on the ground. We have been tracking these sources, verifying details, checking for duplication, and extracting necessary information from these reports.
Data
Browse
Total deaths is 682.
Last updated at 2021-08-03 22:00:00 IST.
Note: You can quickly browse the latest version of the data here. Filtering is possible using the Search box. You can click on the title to sort the table. You can use the pagination at the bottom of the table to explore page by page. You can also change rows per page. By default it is 25.
Download
We have semi parsed data availabe as CSV.
Right click on link -> Save link as.
Columns
Columns in CSV are self explanatory. They are all in small caps without any spaces. No special character other than _ is used as part of column name.
- s_no - S.No. - General Sequence Number
- date_of_incident - Date of Incident
- hospital_place - Hospital/Place
- district - District
- state - State
- no_of_deaths - No of Deaths
- category - Category
- source - Source of the information, like News, Social Media etc
- date_of_report - Date of Report
- reference - Link to reference material
Web Archive of media
Individual articles are archived automatically on archive.org.
Frequently Asked Questions
1.What are you doing?
We are recording deaths due to the lack of oxygen, shortage of oxygen, or denial of oxygen in hospitals during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India. The deaths recorded are based on reports from newspapers and news media in English and regional languages, social media, and networks of volunteers working on the ground. We have been tracking these sources, verifying details, checking for duplication, and extracting necessary information from these reports.
2.Why are you doing this?
We see this as part of a democratic effort, to maintain an archive of lives lost due to lack of oxygen. We are maintaining a record of the human costs of the institutional crises that have led to oxygen shortages. This will also help in countering the ongoing denial and erasure of these deaths in official and government narratives. We hope that this documentation will provide lessons, now and in the future.
3.When did you start recording?
We started recording cases in the first week of May. The earliest report we have is from 13 April 2021.
4.Who are you?
We are an independent group of volunteers, researchers, lawyers, journalists, students, and activists.
5.What are the limitations of this exercise?
Our effort will underestimate the actual number of deaths, since we are relying on verified, publicly available information, which is likely to miss many deaths that go unreported. In general, deaths due to lack of other resources are missed. Since we are focusing on deaths within hospitals, those that were unable to be admitted in the hospitals will be missed. This is much more likely in rural areas, where healthcare access remains severely constrained.
6.Under what license is the data distributed?
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).
7. How can I reach out to you?
You can write to us at oxygendenialdeaths [at] gmail [dot] com. If you are on twitter, please feel free to reply to this thread by Aditi Priya
8.How can I support your effort?
You can help us include any report we may have missed by replying to our twitter thread. For personal stories, you can also email (oxygendenialdeaths [at] gmail [dot] com) us, and for news stories, you can fill this form. Please also consider donating to groups who are directly helping in this crisis.
9. What is the data release timeline?
Efforts to collate data are continuous. We are planning to do weekly consolidated releases
10. How are you verifying details of deaths and incidents?
When multiple reports referring to the same incident cite different death counts, we usually record the lowest number, and note this discrepancy in the comments. In some incidents of conflicting reports, we have had access to a more reliable estimate, such as the estimate cited in court documents. This is the death count we have used in our database in such cases. In cases where government agencies or hospital authorities have denied that deaths were because of oxygen denial, we have relied on multiple media reports to assess facts. In cases where a committee has been set up by the government to assess the cause of deaths, we have also relied on multiple reports. We will update our database when results from the committee reports are available. In cases where only one media report is available, we do not immediately add the deaths to our database.
License
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Projects Using this dataset
- If you are using this data in your project or article. Send me a link so we can add here.