AMMAN (Reuters) – Jordan’s health minister was fired on Saturday after the deaths of seven people following an oxygen outage at a hospital treating coronavirus patients, and police deployed to detain hundreds of relatives angry, they reported state media and witnesses.
Oxygen failure on Saturday affected the intensive care, maternity and coronavirus rooms of the new government hospital in Salt, west of the capital Amman.
Prime Minister Bisher al-Khaswaneh said he had fired Health Minister Nathir Obeidat. In a public apology, he said his government took full responsibility for the incident.
“It is a serious mistake that cannot be justified or accepted. I feel ashamed and will not justify it, ”said Khaswaneh, who added that he was awaiting the results of a judicial investigation.
Obeidat said he had “moral responsibility” for the deaths of patients, who were being treated for COVID-19 when services ran out of oxygen for nearly an hour.
King Abdullah visited the hospital to an extent that officials said he intended to turn off tensions. Anger with the authorities has in the past caused civil unrest in Jordan.
“How can a hospital like this see something like this happen?” he said upon entering the multimillion-dollar hospital, which came into operation only last August.
Some politicians said the incident pointed to significant mismanagement in government hospitals.
Jordan is facing an increase in COVID-19 infections attributed mainly to the rapid transmission of the coronavirus variant first identified in Britain and announced stricter measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 last week.
Jordan reported 8,300 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, the highest daily death toll since the pandemic hit the kingdom a year ago.
Jordan, with a population of about 10 million, has recorded 385,533 cases of COVID-19 and 5,224 deaths.
Report by Suleiman Al-Khalidi, edited by Ros Russell, Alexandra Hudson and Timothy Heritage