India finally woke up to the grim reality that oxygen is the key to life. The realisation has come after enormous suffering due to the unexpected spike in the second wave of Covid-19 pandemic, hospitals running out of oxygen supply and logistical shortcomings glaring at us in the face to supply quickly, even if oxygen is available elsewhere.
India on Wednesday recorded 4,205 deaths due to Covid, the highest to date with 3,48,421 new cases according to the Union ministry of health and family welfare. Deaths are primarily due to the failure of oxygen supply as the country is struggling to open up new oxygen manufacturing units to meet the shortage.
Amid the pandemic, the price list of oxygen cylinders has touched the roof. Going by a rough calculation, if a Covid patient requires 3 cylinders per day, it costs Rs.1,800 per day with an average cost of oxygen cylinder refilling cost being Rs.600 now, according to the Medlifee website. This amounts to Rs.2,19,000 per annum and taking a person's average lifetime as 70 years, it amounts to Rs.5.5 crore, a mindboggling figure still.
Cost of oxygen we breathe freely
In other words, according to Science Focus magazine, a human breathes about 9.5 tonnes of air in a year, but oxygen only makes up about 23 per cent of that air by mass, and we only extract a little over a third of the oxygen from each breath. Environment Canada, the National Environment Agency of Canada states that one tree produces nearly 260 pounds of oxygen each year. So, it works out to a total of about 740 kg of oxygen per year, which is roughly equivalent to seven or eight trees.
With the pandemic forcing us to realise the need for plants and their utility in providing us free oxygen throughout our lifetime, saving us a whopping Rs.5.5 crore at current prices, environmentalists and green activists are hoping that the post-pandemic days will turn greener than before.
Since humans had learnt the lesson of human destruction after the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, they never resorted to using them though multiplied them as deterrence. Now that, the Covid deaths due to oxygen shortage multiplying around us every day, environmentalists are finally bringing home the point -- Planting Trees!
