The World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Wednesday that hospitals are facing a shortage in oxygen concentrators needed to support the breathing of COVID-19 patients suffering from respiratory distress. The warning comes as one million new cases of coronavirus are confirmed worldwide per week.

“Many countries are now experiencing difficulties obtaining oxygen concentrators,” WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “Demand is currently outstripping supply.”

The health agency has bought 14,000 oxygen concentrators from manufacturers and plans to send them to 120 countries in coming weeks, Tedros said. A further 170,000 concentrators, worth about US $100 million  will be potentially available over the next six months. In addition, WHO has bought 9800 pulse oximeters, a simple device used to monitor oxygen in a patient’s blood, which are being prepared for shipment, said Dr Tedros.

WHO Director General said, “Patients with severe and critical COVID-19 cannot get enough oxygen into their blood by breathing normally. They need higher concentrations of oxygen and support to get it into their lungs.”

Another challenge is that many patients with critical disease need a higher flow rate of oxygen than is produced by most commercially available concentrators, said WHO chief. “To address this challenge, WHO is supporting several countries to buy equipment that will enable them to generate their own concentrated oxygen in larger amounts.”

“This is a sustainable solution for COVID-19 and beyond, but requires technical expertise for maintenance. WHO has also published technical specifications for the design of this equipment, as well as guidance for countries on oxygen sources and distribution”, said Dr Tedros.

Globally, the coronavirus tally reached 9,408,757 while the death toll climbed to 4,82,184 on Thursday, with the WHO saying it expected global infections to pass 10 million by the end of the week.

“We expect to reach a total of 10M cases within the next week.
This is a sober reminder that even as we continue R&D into vaccines & therapeutics, we have an urgent responsibility to do everything we can with the tools we have now to suppress transmission & save lives”-@DrTedros

— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) June 24, 2020

Cases continue to surge in the United States which confirmed its second-highest one-day total in the pandemic so far, according to Oxford University data project Our World in Data, with 34,700 new infections. It is the highest since 26 April, when a record 48,529 cases were confirmed in 24 hours.  Meanwhile, Brazil has reported 1,188,631 cases of the virus and 53,830 deaths. The death toll due to the pandemic in Latin America is expected to reach 3,90,000 by October with Brazil and Mexico accounting for two-thirds of fatalities, the University of Washington said on Wednesday.