Today in dystopian hellscape information: covid-19 circumstances in Orlando have apparently gotten so overwhelming that it’s begun impacting the town’s water provide. Yes, actually.

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer requested residents to carry off on washing their automobiles and watering their lawns “for at least a week,” throughout a press convention on Friday, citing the town’s current surge in hospitalizations because the trigger. The Orlando Utility Commission, he defined, normally treats the town’s water with tanks of freezing liquid oxygen to make it potable. But proper now, these tanks are being diverted to assist present oxygen to the record-breaking variety of folks within the hospital for covid-19.

“We acknowledge that the number one priority for the liquid oxygen should be for hospitals,” Dyer mentioned at a information convention.

The concentrated oxygen in these tanks is a treasured useful resource for sufferers with covid-19-induced lung injury—and one which we’ve already seen run low in different states, like California and New Mexico. The AP notes that the Orlando Utilities Commission sometimes plows by way of 10 vehicles of liquid oxygen in every week to treat the town’s faucet water. But now, anyplace between three to 5 of these vehicles are going to be heading to hospitals as an alternative to assist hold covid-19 sufferers alive.

A staggering 40% of the town’s potable water is used for watering lawns, the largest “crop” within the U.S. The utility fee is asking residents to preserve between 25 % and 50% of regular water use per day. “Currently we pump about 90 MGD (millions of gallons per day), and our goal would be to not exceed 50 MGD,” the fee notes. If residents fail to heed the mayor’s plea, the town’s water high quality might deteriorate.

There are layers of dangerous issues taking place right here. Lawns are primarily a organic lifeless zone for native species. University of Florida ecology and conservation professor Mark Hostetler, instructed Earther lawns are “almost like concrete.” Yet residents in Orlando dump tens of millions of gallons of completely good, drinkable water on daily basis to maintain lawns inexperienced. (To be truthful, tens of millions of Americans elsewhere do the identical.) 

But past the lawns are the darkish state of covid-19 affairs in Florida. Notably, Dyer didn’t point out one other straightforward step these folks might take to assist hold hospitals—and thus, the town’s water system—from being overwhelmed: Wearing a masks and getting vaccinated. Florida’s state authorities has been outright hostile with regards to mandating these public well being measures.

Gov. Ron DeSantis spearheaded a law that gave his workplace the facility to invalidate guidelines meant to gradual the unfold of covid-19. Among these are permitting companies to restrict their working hours or requiring proof of vaccination for folks coming in. Either due to denial, callousness, or batshit political beliefs, the person nonetheless hasn’t budged. It didn’t matter whether or not the state was seeing 21,000 new COVID circumstances in a single day, or if the state’s hospitals and crematoriums are actually buckling underneath the burden of the sheer variety of lifeless and dying throughout the state, or that the very companies that make up the “free market” are suing DeSantis. But who is aware of, possibly a couple of wilted lawns will likely be sufficient to snap him out of it.