The anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protesters who rampaged through Sydney and Melbourne on Saturday might be interested to read a gripping account by a US hospital doctor, who is treating unvaccinated, dying Covid patients, some of whom beg for a vaccine, only to be told that they have left the decision too late.
Australia has been spared the worst of the pandemic so far – a lucky country in that respect. But deaths are still occurring here, including two women yesterday in New South Wales. One of them, from central Sydney and aged 38, died of Covid at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, despite having no pre-existing conditions.
The highly contagious Delta strain of Covid-19 is on the loose in Sydney and Melbourne and medical authorities are battling to keep it under control. Nobody was helped by the demonstrations over the weekend.
In the US, the pandemic is vastly worse and is now slaughtering thousands of unvaccinated Americans.
Last Monday, Dr Brytney Cobia, who works at Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham, Alabama, posted on Facebook an account of her experience:
“I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious Covid infections,” Dr Cobia wrote.
“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.
“A few days later when I call time of death, I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same.
“They cry. And they tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color they wouldn’t get as sick. They thought it was ‘just the flu’. But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But they can’t. So they thank me and they go get the vaccine.”
Each time Dr Cobia returns to her office to write a death certificate for a patient who has died of Covid, she says “a small prayer that this loss will save more lives”. By letting the public know what is happening, she hopes to persuade more people to get vaccinated.
Alabama, in the US deep South, comes last in America in vaccination rate, with only 33.7% of the state’s residents fully vaccinated. In the US, Covid-19 is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated. On 16 July 2021, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr Rochelle Walensky, revealed that 99.5% of recent US deaths from Covid-19 were of unvaccinated people.
Even Alabama’s vaccination rate, though woefully low, is more than double that of Australia. The vaccination rate in Australia, as of last Friday (23 July 2021) was: 12.9% fully vaccinated and 17.5% only one dose.
Written by Peter Needham
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