Requirement may shoot up if cases continue to rise: govt. The Tamil Nadu government on Monday told the Madras High Court that though the Centre had revised the quantity of oxygen allotted to the State from 220 tonnes to 419 tonnes a day, it is still short of the current actual consumption of around 470 tonnes a day. “The acute shortage of medical oxygen on a day-to-day basis is putting the lives of affected COVID-19 patients at grave risk,” the government said. Appearing before the first Division Bench of Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy, Advocate General R. Shunmugasundaram said the State’s oxygen requirement was expected to increase further to around 850 tonnes a day in the next 15 days if the number of COVID-19 patients under hospitalisation on oxygen-supported beds continues to increase in the days to come.