Dr.
Brytney Cobia said Monday that all but one of her COVID patients in
Alabama did not receive the vaccine. The vaccinated patient, she said,
just needed a little oxygen and is expected to fully recover. Some of
the others are dying.
“I’m
admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID
infections,” wrote Cobia, a hospitalist at Grandview Medical Center in
Birmingham, in an emotional Facebook post 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.”
Three
COVID-19 vaccines have been widely available in Alabama for months now,
yet the state is last in the nation in vaccination rate, with only 33.7
percent of the population fully vaccinated. COVID-19 case numbers and hospitalizations are surging yet again due to the more contagious Delta variant of the virus and Alabama’s low vaccination rate.
For
the first year and a half of the pandemic, Cobia and hundreds of other
Alabama physicians caring for critically ill COVID-19 patients worked
themselves to the bone trying to save as many as possible.
“Back in 2020 and early 2021, when the vaccine wasn’t available, it was just tragedy after tragedy after tragedy,” Cobia told AL.com this week. “You know, so many people that did all the right things, and yet still came in, and were critically ill and died.”
“A
few days later when I call time of death,” continued Cobia on Facebook,
“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. And I go back to my office, write their death note, and say a
small prayer that this loss will save more lives.”
More
than 11,400 Alabamians have died of COVID so far, but midway through
2021, caring for COVID patients is a different story than it was in the
beginning. Cobia said it’s different mentally and emotionally to care
for someone who could have prevented their disease but chose not to.
“You
kind of go into it thinking, ‘Okay, I’m not going to feel bad for this
person, because they make their own choice,’” Cobia said. “But then you
actually see them, you see them face to face, and it really changes your
whole perspective, because they’re still just a person that thinks that
they made the best decision that they could with the information that
they have, and all the misinformation that’s out there.
“And
now all you really see is their fear and their regret. And even though I
may walk into the room thinking, ‘Okay, this is your fault, you did
this to yourself,’ when I leave the room, I just see a person that’s
really suffering, and that is so regretful for the choice that they
made.”
Cobia said that the strain wears on healthcare workers after the trauma of 2020 and 2021.
“It’s
really hard because all of us physicians and other medical staff, we’ve
been doing this for a long time and all of us are very, at this point,
tired and emotionally drained and cynical,” she said.
Cobia
said the current wave of Delta patients reminds her of the time in
October and November of 2020, just before Alabama’s peak of coronavirus
cases and deaths.
“What
we saw in December 2020, and January 2021, that was the absolute peak,
the height of the pandemic, where I was signing 10 death certificates a
day,” she said. “Now, it’s certainly not like that, but it’s very
reminiscent of probably October, November of 2020, where we know there’s
a lot of big things coming up.”
Cobia worries that the upcoming school year will lead to a similar surge.
“All
these kids are about to go back to school. No mask mandates are in
place at all, 70% of Alabama is unvaccinated. Of course, no kids are
vaccinated for the most part because they can’t be,” Cobia said. “So it
feels like impending doom, basically.”
Cobia
also had a personal experience with the virus, contracting it in July
while 27 weeks pregnant with her second child. Her symptoms were mild
and the child, Carter, was delivered early out of caution but suffered
no serious complications.
Her
husband, Miles, is also a physician, and the couple says they were both
extremely cautious about wearing protective equipment but one of them
still caught the virus and gave it to the other, as well as other family
members.
“We
still went to work but we masked 100% of the time,” Cobia said. “We
didn’t go anywhere or do anything, we ordered through Shipt for all of
our groceries, we did nothing at the time.”
Cobia
said she delivered in September without incident and got the vaccine
herself in December when it was made available to healthcare workers.
“I
did not hesitate to get it,” she said. “There was a lot unknown at that
time, because I was still breastfeeding about whether that was safe or
not. I talked to as many other physician colleagues as I could and spoke
with my OB as far as data that she had available and decided to
continue breastfeeding after vaccination.”
For
people who are hesitant to receive the vaccine, Cobia recommends
speaking to their primary care physician about their concerns, just as
she did.
“I
try to be very non-judgmental when I’m getting a new COVID patient
that’s unvaccinated, but I really just started asking them, ‘Why haven’t
you gotten the vaccine?’ And I’ll just ask it point blank, in the least
judgmental way possible,” she said. “And most of them, they’re very
honest, they give me answers. ‘I talked to this person, I saw this thing
on Facebook, I got this email, I saw this on the news,’ you know, these
are all the reasons that I didn’t get vaccinated.
“And
the one question that I always ask them is, did you make an appointment
with your primary care doctor and ask them for their opinion on whether
or not you should receive the vaccine? And so far, nobody has answered
yes to that question.”
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