The Iranian public has been suffering through extensive and unannounced power cuts on a daily basis since early May, which has caused widespread difficulties for most of the country. One key example of this is patients who are hooked up to life-saving medical devices, whether in a hospital or at home, who lose power.
Officials said that the blackouts will continue for at least another month.
Of course, as these power outages are happening at the same time that the fifth wave of Covid-19 has hit the country hard and hospitalisation rates have increased, it is affecting the country’s ability to fight the pandemic. Many thousands of Covid-19 patients are using ventilators, but those recovering at home with smaller versions don’t have access to the backup generators that the hospitals do.
There aren’t official statistics about inpatient deaths because of the outages, but online videos demonstrate the dire conditions. As the lives of these people are threatened on the daily, the mental health of them and those around them have been affected dramatically.
But the Energy Ministry claims that it doesn’t have any responsibility for those receiving medical care at home. One of the Power Generation and Transmission Company’s officials said last year that the company doesn’t have any responsibility for oxygen users at home and insisted that every patient needs their own emergency electrical equipment, which is very expensive.
The regime promised before that electricity would not be cut off at hospitals under any circumstances and that medical centers have emergency generators, but this fails to take into account that the system is not automatic and needs some time to connect, which causes many deaths and makes conditions much worse.
Dr Mohammad-Reza Hashemian, an ICU specialist at Masih Daneshvari Hospital, posted a video on Instagram of patients on their ventilators during a blackout, explaining that the patients are dying because the generators had not been connected
He said: “When oxygen is cut off, some ventilators stop working correctly. Some ventilators which work with turbines become completely useless. This has a very bad effect on patients. When this happens, sometimes patients suffering from COVID-19 die before healthcare workers can fix the oxygen. We have said this many times but unfortunately, the Ministry of Health refuses to publish the details surrounding the deaths of COVID-19 patients.”
Hashemian further explained that the Health Ministry bought ventilators without checking with relevant experts, which led to a decrease in oxygen pressure and patient death. He advised that the regime will not announce how many COVID-19 patients died during the blackouts.
