On Wednesday, the The Tampa Bay water company announced a rather strange side effect of Covid’s rise out of Florida’s control: it wasn’t getting enough deliveries of liquid oxygen to treat the water. More than 17,000 Covid patients – who need extra oxygen to stay alive – are hospitalized across the state and there is not enough oxygen to circulate.
Even with vaccines widely available, the pandemic is worse than ever in Florida. The state averages more than 20,000 cases and more than 200 deaths a day, which puts incredible pressure on its hospital system. Just over half of Florida’s total population is completely vaccinated.
“What we do know is that the lack of liquid oxygen is due to the shortage of drivers and the need to supply the supplies available to local hospitals due to the Covid-19 pandemic,” says Brandon Moore, a spokesman for Tampa Bay Water. . (Requests for comments sent to Matheson Tri-Gas, its oxygen supplier, were not immediately returned.) This comes a week after the mayor of Orlando asked residents to limit the use of water for the same reason.
Add water problems to the growing list of consequences of a pandemic that now hospitalizes mostly the unvaccinated. This means less space and resources for non-covid patients appearing in the emergency room and now less oxygen for systems that provide clean water to Floridians.
But why do you need even more oxygen in your H2Oh? Tampa Bay Water transports liquid oxygen, which it converts to gas, and then adds a spark of electricity to convert it to ozone. This is used in two separate facilities for two separate purposes, Moore says: in a surface water treatment plant, ozone kills nasties like bacteria and viruses, and in a different plant it breaks down hydrogen sulfide. , a natural gas that smells like rotten eggs.
The public team needs a lot of liquid oxygen – from seven to nine tankers a week, between the two facilities – both to disinfect the water and ensure that it does not come out of the taps that smell like hell center. “Liquid oxygen converted to ozone is one of the most potent (if not the most potent) disinfectants in the water industry,” says Moore.
Tampa Bay Water’s liquid oxygen supply has been reduced by about half, Moore says. Thus, they divert the oxygen they have to the treatment plant to disinfect the water enough, as they cannot alter this process. However, they can replace plant ozone that removes hydrogen sulfide from sodium hypochlorite, also known as bleach. But given the crisis, the company uses customers to reduce water consumption, such as watering lawns and washing cars. “In this scenario, less water needed for demand means less water to treat,” Moore says. But, he adds, “it’s very important for residents to know that drinking water quality remains safe.”
At the same time, it is very important that patients with Covid get the extra oxygen they need. Covid-19 brutalizes the lungs, interfering with the transfer of oxygen from the air to the bloodstream, which is needed to keep the heart, brain and other vital organs functioning properly. Target oxygen saturation for the blood is over 92%, below 90% and you start to feel short of breath. (At the hospital, they measure this by sliding a device called a pulse oximeter over a patient’s finger, which fires beams of light to non-invasively measure blood oxygen.) Once saturation drops below 90 %, doctors should put a Covid-19. patient with supplemental oxygen, advises the Centers for Disease Control.