It sounds like if people do not cut back, then they will do the reasonable thing and prioritize sending oxygen to the hospitals, accepting that this means people's tap water will start smelling sulfurous [EDIT: and maybe need boiling before drinking]
> To reduce demand for liquid oxygen, OUC is asking water customers to immediately limit irrigating their lawns and landscapes. If OUC’s liquid oxygen supplies continue to be depleted and water usage isn’t reduced, water quality may be impacted. -- https://www.ouc.com/water-info
not precisely-- while the ozone they produce from liquid oxygen does serve the purpose of making the water more palatable, it serves a higher purpose as their primary disinfectant. the faq in the link you provided states that OUD doesn't have the capacity to sufficiently disinfect water using chlorine alone
if people do not cut back, Orlando will have to issue a boil-water notice
I, too, find the anti-science resistance to vaccines and masks exhausting and I sympathize with the frustration felt by many who recognize the pandemic doesn’t have to be this difficult but your (hopefully hyperbolic) calls for violence are inappropriate and frankly disgusting.
I am one of the unvaccinated. My decision was based on possible effects to myself from the vaccine versus how dangerous the vaccine was to me. [1]
I'll make you a deal: if I get sick, I won't hospitalize myself, even if I need to, as long as you never execute the violence you called for. Deal?
However, there are those that have not gotten the vaccines because their doctors told them not to. What about those people?
The truth that most people forget is that hospitals are usually near their capacity all of the time anyway because empty beds are expensive with no profit. And as another comment stated, the problem is not that there isn't enough oxygen, but that there are not enough truckers to bring it in. Seems to me the biggest cause of the problem is a bad economy, not the unvaccinated.
You may disagree, but your calls for violence are not going to convince the unvaccinated that you have their best interests at heart.
You're incredibly wrong. The vaccine is safe. It works. And it's the only tool that will end the pandemic.
What does someone need to say to you for you to start caring about other people?
Or is this some bogus "the man is making money!" lines of thought? You realize that the vaccine makers have already made their money...right? They're all been paid to make the vaccines: that's why they're free at point of distribution. You getting a shot doesn't get them any richer. In fact, you can help big pharma make more money by getting sick. When you are slowly suffocating to death as your lungs fail, in your panic, you'll absolutely ask for anything to be out into your body for the hope that you won't die in agony (there's no treatments or cures, so it'll be a crap shoot).
Though, maybe you will avoid the same end as so many other Americans...
I'm glad you said that you won't get hospitalized because you have said that you refuse to be vaccinated. Because, honestly, while I hope that you don't die of this extremely preventable disease, I also hope that you don't waste other people's time. I have family that work in the ER. They've been doing this for over a year now: they exhausted themselves trying to save people before there was a way to prevent COVID.
Now....after having to interact with increasingly hostile patients (because only the unvaxxed are getting sick enough to be hospitalized) they don't really have any patience anymore. t
They're tired of seeing scared unvaxxers coming in, being angry, and demanding the vaccine as they're dying. Only to get more hostile as they have to explain to them that there's no cures, no treatment, and that it's way too late to get vaccinated. They're past the point of empathy for people that can't even do the bate minimum to take care of their own health.
And, by the way, the unvaxxed are the only ones dying of COVID now. At worst, vaxxed folk come into the ICU for a day or two; never need a ventilator. The unvaxxed come in incredibly sick; more and more I get reports that young (20-40) are getting deathly ill. And, even more shocking, delta hits kids much harder than alpha: they're saying in droves now too. It's no longer a disease of the elderly and feeble anymore.
I've heard enough horror stories to say with sincerity that I hope you don't get vented. It's a terrible way to die: to have your last days on earth be around strangers looking down at you through masks and goggles while you're physically unable to speak. Slowly suffocating to death as a machine works increasingly harder to force air into your decaying lungs. Once you go on a vent, your chances of survival are depressingly low.
Yet its effectiveness is decreasing with each new variant.
> And it's the only tool that will end the pandemic.
COVID is endemic now. Nothing will "end" the pandemic.
> You realize that the vaccine makers have already made their money. They're all been paid...right? You getting a shot doesn't get them any richer.
First off, no, my decision is not about making Big Pharma more money, but you are simply wrong here. Yes, they have already made money making some amount of doses, but if I get the vaccine, that adds to the demand, which raises the price, which causes them to make more and sell more, which makes them more money.
> I hope that you don't die of this extremely preventable disease. I hope you don't get vented and have your last days on earth be around strangers looking down at you through masks and goggles while you're physically unable to speak +because, you know, there'll be a giant tube in your throat).
I have already made the decision that if I get that sick, I won't get treatment because I did not get the vaccine. So talking about how I don't care about people is entirely wrong as well. I care about people, so I won't take the hospital bed. Also, I care about their rights, so I will die on that hill.
Also, I suspect that I've already had COVID. I thought it was a cold at the time. So I don't think getting the vaccine would do me any good.
It's unbelievably well tested. Pfizer and Moderna have minimal side effects compared even yo the most mild of COVID cases. You're saying that you're ok with extreme covid symptoms (permeant reduced lung capacity, significant loss of taste and smell, permeant brain fog) but not ok with a vaccine that's proven safe in hundreds of millions of people? That's just bad risk assessment.
And they're still incredibly effective against new strains. They're preventing hospitalization, death, and extreme, permeant symptoms. That is their goal. They're working.
> but if I get the vaccine, that adds to the demand,
Wrong. The supply is already created. It's already been paid for by the federal government. Your individual demand is irrelevant.
> I won't get treatment because I did not get the vaccine. So talking about how I don't care about people is entirely wrong as well. I care about people, so I won't take the hospital bed.
If you're unvaccinated, then you are still hurting others by being a vector for (1) incubating the virus and thus spreading it and (2) being a petri dish for deadly mutation to evolve. And if your resolve on your deathbed changes, as so many doctors and nurses have seen, then you'll take that hospital bed anyways.
And if you did actually already have COVID (and not a cold or any number of other diseases that are mild and share some COVID symptoms), then getting better antibodies would be a good thing. No logic as to why you would not want to increase your immune systems' effectiveness.
Not long term. Sorry, but you simply are not going to convince me on this one.
It's heavily tested, but not well tested. There is a difference.
> Wrong. The supply is already created. It's already been paid for by the federal government. Your individual demand is irrelevant.
If it's already been paid for, then either a lot are going to waste, because they expire, or they are going somewhere else, which means my individual demand, while tiny, is not irrelevant.
> If you're unvaccinated, then you are still hurting others by being a vector for (1) incubating the virus and thus spreading it and (2) being a petri dish for deadly mutation to evolve.
The vaccinated are vectors and petri dishes too. A virus is going to virus.
> And if you did actually already have COVID (and not a cold or any number of other diseases that are mild and share some COVID symptoms), then getting better antibodies would be a good thing. No logic as to why you would not want to increase your immune systems' effectiveness.
Because the vaccines may actually not increase the effectiveness of my immune system and may give me extra health problems. There is a logic, and you appear to not have read my blog post about it.
> The vaccinated are vectors and petri dishes too. A virus is going to virus.
Ok........you don't understand how antibodies & viral replication work. Please learn from people who are more knowledgeable than you and stop playing around. People are dying. People are being hurt. It's not an academic game.
> And, by the way, the unvaxxed are the only ones dying of COVID now. At worst, vaxxed folk come into the ICU for a day or two; never need a ventilator.
Strictly speaking that's not 100% true, there have been covid deaths of fully vaccinated people. I personally know of one here in CA.
Of course, these are few and far between, nearly all the deaths are unvaccinated people, so the rest of your points stand.
It’s such a crazy world - a few months ago when I told people about having longcovid and how I didn’t want a relapse from the vaccine they were supportive. But now I’d get more compassion saying I’m a violent sex offender. Amazing what indoctrination can do in a few months.
I am sorry you're being downvoted, the fact that people can do exactly what you're doing is one of the only positively distinguishing things about our country these days, and of course the capability for folks to do it shrinks by the minute.
I do not likely share much in common with you culturally, but I sincerely delight in seeing an independently-minded thinker boldly taking the conversation to places they probably need to go.
> I do not likely share much in common with you culturally, but I sincerely delight in seeing an independently-minded thinker boldly taking the conversation to places they probably need to go.
Thank you. :)
I think the most important culture to share is being independently-minded, so I guess we share that at the very least, and that makes me happy, no matter what parts of culture we don't share.
> hydrogen sulfide from water pumped in from the Lower Floridan Aquifer.
Those who have not experienced Florida water do not recognize just how big a deal that is. The water is "potable", sure, but it's viciously stinky. Some people can't adapt to it at all. I've known people who lost livestock they imported, because it couldn't adapt to the water.
I solved the problem with this: https://www.amazon.com/Injection-manganese-Removal-Oxidizing...
... works really well and requires little/no maintenance for the first few years. Before that I had a chlorine injection system and it was a nightmare (maintenance-wise).
Very cool solution. I know many people that spent an extra $15k to drill 200+ft deep wells into the aquifer just to avoid the sulphur smell in the water from shallow wells. This would be a very cost effective workaround.
Another article that buries the real reason there is a shortage.
>In August, Florida hospitals were struggling to get their hands on oxygen supplies in part because there were few truck drivers available who were qualified to transport it.
So it seems there is more than enough O2, it's just that they don't have enough Truck Drivers that are licensed to transport it. Either way it's still a problem but it's not related to the production of Liquid Oxygen.
Evaporation is substantial. They do chlorinate their own water though - at least in Disney and Universal Studios, so if they're pulling their own groundwater it would not affect the local water.
Requires people licensed to transport liquid oxygen as well as tanker trucks designed for it; with so much unplanned for demand, it's hard to balance the needs of medical and industrial oxygen quickly.
The actual chemical used in treatment here is ozone, not oxygen. Ozone is not stable enough to be transported any great distance, so it has to be made on-site, which involves zapping oxygen with electrical arcs. The oxygen feed must be a pure oxygen atmosphere, unless you want your ozone to be heavily contaminated with various nitrogen oxides. So you need pure oxygen in industrial quantities, which means shipping in liquid oxygen.
Industrially, oxygen comes from filtering it out of the air--air is about 22% oxygen, after all. It's possible to do that on site, but the maintenance of the machine to filter it isn't really worth it compared to just ordering a new tanker of liquid oxygen every few days.
Another issue with breaking up water molecules is you need a fairly pure source of water to do that. The water in a water treatment plant is anything but pure.
> It's possible to do that on site, but the maintenance of the machine to filter it isn't really worth it compared to just ordering a new tanker of liquid oxygen every few days.
The former is a thing. Some hospitals do on-site generation instead of trucking it in. If they’re extracting from air; seems like a waste of separated N2/argon/other gases, but the disintermediation might pay for it all.
But the problem with COVID is that its peak capacity wasn’t designed for that much draw and they had to move patients elsewhere. Not even sure if they can store in the liquid state or accept deliveries in liquid.
Why would you do so when you have for free in the air? Then you would need the same amount of energy and the same process to make it liquid, since it's very impractical and dangerous to store and move high pressure oxigen
As noted, the ozone process requires high-purity O2 as source stock. That's recovered from atmospheric air through one of several processes. My understanding is that cryogenic seperattion is the principle method (it's a bit like fractional distillation, but in reverse, seperating air into its constituent gasses based on their liquification temperatures).
There's also pressure-swing absorption and membrane technology (differential diffusion), as well as by-product availability from other processes (e.g., nitrogen production).
you can't just add electricity to the water. the treatment plant already exists and probably needs to be running & producing potable water 24/7 with little room for fiddling around. besides, you can provide oxidation by running the water through an aerator, if you have one.
The liquid oxygen is used to produce ozone, which, in addition to solving their taste and odor issues, is a potent disinfectant. However, ozone doesn't leave a detectable disinfectant residual in the water like chlorine does. Testing for that residual allows you to show that at any given tap in your distribution system, the water remains disinfected.
By using ozone for primary disinfection, you can greatly reduce the amount of chlorine you add to the water before you send it out into the distribution system, so you end up with fewer undesirable disinfection byproducts. Orlando's problem seems to be that they don't have the capacity to adequately disinfect the water with chlorine alone.
> the city’s water regulator uses liquid oxygen as part of its process for removing foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide from water pumped in from the Lower Floridan Aquifer.
So what's happening in the South now is a preview of what will happen in the Northern States, perhaps even worse since the vaccines will further drop in effectiveness due to time duration (hence the need for 'boosters').
I live in Canada and health authorities are making the same error. July cases lower than March/April so they relaxed. But summer is supposed to be low.
All stats in August 2021 are worse than August 2020 despite vaccinations. Not an optimistic setup for winter.
How are these vaccinated counted? Is this the federal government or the state? I heard the state is delaying giving out infections and deaths by weeks making look like it's not that bad. If the state is counting the vaccinations I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers are also inaccurate.
> To reduce demand for liquid oxygen, OUC is asking water customers to immediately limit irrigating their lawns and landscapes. If OUC’s liquid oxygen supplies continue to be depleted and water usage isn’t reduced, water quality may be impacted. -- https://www.ouc.com/water-info