Suffering serious lung damage because of Covid19 infection, senior IPS officer Mr. Debasis Panigrahi was flown to Kolkata in an air ambulance on Tuesday for advanced treatment at a multi-specialty medical facility.
The Director of State Vigilance was scheduled to be airlifted on Monday but the doctors had to wait for his condition to stabilize. As soon as they thought, it’s safe, he was shifted from a private hospital at Cuttack to Bhubaneswar airport in an ambulance escorted by a posse of police vehicles through a green corridor. Police Commissioner Saumendra Priyadarshi who was present at the airport personally supervised the transit.
The officer was then airlifted at around 2:30 pm from Biju Patnaik International Airport. He will be under Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) treatment as his lungs have been severely damaged due to the virus.
He was undergoing treatment for Covid-19 at Cuttack and was under ventilator support. His oxygen levels were constantly dipping and he showed no signs of improvement following which the doctors took a call to shift him to Kolkata.
