46 Stories about People Who Regret Not Getting the Vaccine
Unvaccinated doctor sends warning to others after catching delta variant
Dr. Jason Loos, a pathologist at Covenant Health, recently caught the delta variant, a much more contagious strain of COVID-19.(KCBD)
LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD/Gray News) – A doctor in Texas says he regrets his decision to not get vaccinated against COVID-19.
KCBD reports Dr. Jason Loos, a pathologist at
Covenant Health, recently caught the delta variant, a much more contagious strain of the virus.
“I’ve never had fever more than a day and a half in my life. I’ve called in sick maybe once in 20 years,” he said.
But after eight days of fever, Loos woke up unable to breathe and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance.
That was in late May. He’s still feeling the effects now, a couple of months later, unable to enjoy activities as before or to smell and taste.
“It took me about three weeks to get back to where I could walk up one flight of stairs,” Loos said. “Even today, if you race me in a 100-yard dash, you’d have to pick me up and take me back to the ER.”
Loos says his choice to not get a COVID-19 vaccination was fueled by a combination of apathy and optimism for how well he would manage the virus if infected.
He also said he wanted to save the dose made available to healthcare workers or a more vulnerable person.
“I’ll always say it’s a personal choice, but the right choice is to get vaccinated,” Loos advised.
“This really is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” said Dr. Brian Schroeder, chief medical officer of Covenant Health Medical Center. “We’re not seeing anyone who has been vaccinated requiring critical care.”
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Coast nurses hit "compassion fatigue" with the unvaccinated as Covid's 4th wave surges
The hum of exhaust systems sucking air out of contaminated rooms filled an ICU at Ocean Springs Hospital on a recent Tuesday.
Health care workers changed in and out of personal protective equipment in a continuous loop, entering rooms only long enough to flip COVID-19 patients from their backs to their bellies; a process called
proning that helps them breathe.
The bodies that lay unconscious were not elderly, they appeared middle-aged.
Mississippi health care workers are in the midst of what one Singing River ICU nurse called a bout of PTSD and another called a bad dream: the fourth wave of COVID-19.
But it’s different than previous surges.
This round, compassion is running dry. Ninety-five percent of the hospitalized patients at Singing River hospitals are unvaccinated.
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And this time is different, because knowing that most of the cases are from unvaccinated patients, it adds a level of frustration that wasn’t there before.”
YOUNGER PATIENTS IN ICU
“This round, we have a 39-year-old female that has fought for about a month now…,” said Singing River ICU nurse Theresa Wolfe. “She’s been scared to death that she’s going to die. She did not get the vaccine.”
When Wolfe left her shift last week, it seemed like things were starting to look up for the patient.
“She’s now on a ventilator with 100% oxygen. Four days later, that’s where she’s at. Is she going to come out of this? We don’t know. We walked in this morning and intubated a patient right off the bat. Emergently. Are these people going to make it? We don’t know.”
“While the world is going on about its business, there are places here and throughout Mississippi and this region where a nurse is having to have the unbearable pain of not knowing how badly COVID might affect their patient,” Bond said.
“I would want the public to know that nurses and clinicians are suffering greatly right now, and I think the world has sort of lost sight of that.”
‘TO SEE THE ACTUAL FACES OF THESE PATIENTS’
Wolfe said that a lot of patients she sees, especially the young ones,
haven’t gotten the vaccine because they think they’re “superman,” among other reasons.
But Babar described in detail what COVID looks like for patients sick enough to be in the ICU. It’s very real and very lonely, he said, for all age groups. Patients cannot see their families, and nurses can only stay in their rooms for limited amounts of time.
For many, the only way to get breath circulating is to have nurses come into their rooms to “prone” them every eight to 16 hours. It’s uncomfortable, especially for obese people.
“When you keep someone prone for days on end, they start breaking down. Their faces start breaking down. They get sores,” Babar said.
When patients reach a point where they need a ventilator, they usually spend weeks to months hooked up. In many cases, they’re not just sedated but paralyzed. During previous waves of COVID, someone’s chance of survival if put on a ventilator was about 55%.
“As we’re putting these patients on the ventilator, we know in our minds that half of them aren’t going to walk out of here,” he said.
What the health care workers hear most often on vaccine hesitancy: there’s not enough research, that they’ve already had the infection so they don’t need to get a vaccine, that a microchip might be placed inside of them and infertility. The biggest hesitation is that they don’t want to be told by the government that they have to get it.
“One person’s words to me were, she would rather die than get vaccinated.”
But the nurses said they’ve also heard a lot of regret from patients who didn’t think the virus was real.
“If they have any kind of regret or change of heart, you’ll hear about that before they get intubated, when they’re still struggling,” Sartin said.