In the middle of the nation’s largest spike yet of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most crucial resources needed to keep people healthy is clean water for drinking and hand washing. Outside of the pandemic, water is the most basic necessity of life, without which human life couldn’t exist. But in the United States, people regularly lose access to water simply because they are poor and unable to pay their water bills.

Astonishingly, by some estimates, more than 2 million people in the United States do not have running water and sanitation in their homes. Water utilities shut off water access to about one out of every twenty people, or close to 15 million, every year for nonpayment (unsurprisingly affecting racial minorities more than others). This barbaric practice has likely killed tens of thousands of people during the COVID-19 pandemic alone. In the wealthiest country in the world, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Throughout the pandemic, we’ve caught glimpses of alternatives. Though the federal government declined to pass a national moratorium on water shutoffs, some states and cities passed laws to prevent utility shutoffs during the pandemic. Now, as the Omicron variant threatens to overwhelm the failing US medical system, these moratoriums are expiring — and utilities are threatening to again deny people water.