Sarah Betancourt reports:
What the US government is calling “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” is playing out in painful ways as some realize too late that they wish they had had the shot, while others hold out even as they suffer in hospital amid a national surge of new Covid-19 infections, primarily caused by the Delta variant.
At least 99% of those in the US who died of coronavirus in the last six months had not been vaccinated, Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has said.
Meanwhile vaccination rates have slowed down nationwide and are especially low in some of the more conservative, southern parts of the country, despite more than 610,000 people in the US dying of the virus since the pandemic hit in early 2020.
In places such as Alabama, only 33% of people who can receive the vaccine had been fully vaccinated, as of 20 July.
On Monday, a doctor in a Birmingham, Alabama, hospital, Brytney Cobia, said that all but one of her Covid patients at Grandview medical center didn’t receive the vaccine, with the one who had expected to make a full recovery after receiving oxygen, she told the Birmingham News. Several others are dying.
“I’m admitting young, healthy people to the hospital with very serious Covid infections,” wrote Cobia in a Facebook post on Sunday.
“One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late,” she added, referring to patients who have to be put on a ventilator.
Alabama public health officials recently reported 96% of Alabamians who have died of Covid since April were not fully vaccinated.
Among the people succumbing to the deadly disease are those who are increasingly catching the Delta variant of the coronavirus, which is far more contagious than the original.
The variant now makes up 83% of new cases in the US, according to Walensky.
“This is a dramatic increase, up from 50% for the week of July 3,” she said.
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