After months of hoping to get a COVID-19 vaccination and then weeks of battling the disease after one never came, Air Force veteran Diane Drewes was in a hospice center in Ohio for the last few times when the phone rings. It was a health worker who called to schedule her first appointment for a coronavirus shot.
Drewes’ daughter, Laura Brown, was stunned by the timing of the January call, but did not tilt over the phone or even explain that her 75-year-old mother was on the verge of death. There was just no point, she said.
“But my sister and I were upset because it was too late,” Brown said. “It looked like the last insult.”
More than 247,000 people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19 since vaccines first became available in mid-December. Officials warned that providing enough vaccines to achieve herd immunity would take months. And because the initial vaccine supply was extremely limited and the virus was circulating throughout the country during the winter, it was a sad reality that some COVID-19s would contract and die before they could be vaccinated.
With recordings If a large percentage of the American population is meant to be vaccinated, it is impossible to say exactly how many of the dead even wanted a vaccination. But Brown said her mother wanted one – desperate. Other families have similar, disturbing stories of loved ones who became infected after staying safe for months and then died before they could get a dose.
Charlotte Crawford, who worked for 40 years in the microbiology lab at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, was fully vaccinated in January after receiving two doses of Moderna vaccine for her work. But then she endured the pain of seeing her husband and two adult children contract COVID-19 and die before they could get shots.
Henry Royce Crawford, 65, had an appointment for a vaccine when he became ill, his widow said. Their children, Roycie Crawford, 33, and Natalia Crawford, 38, also wanted the shot, but did not get one yet when they fell ill and died, Crawford said.
The days since their deaths in late February and early March seem to Crawford like a mess; she is still figuring out what happened while pleading with anyone who will listen to get a vaccine as soon as possible.
“All I know is that I did three funerals in three weeks,” said Crawford, of Forney, Texas.
While more than 96 million people in the U.S. have received at least one dose of vaccine, only 53 million have been fully vaccinated, or about 16% of the country’s population, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
With doses now more available, shots go at a faster pace. More than a dozen states have been eligible for vaccine for all adults amid an increase in virus cases.
Only the Johnson & Johnson uptake was completed after one dose, so the waiting time between the first and second uptake of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines leaves a period of weeks when the recipient is vulnerable and subject to infection.
The wait for a second shot was too long for Richard Rasmussen of Las Vegas, daughter Julie Rasmussen said.
Richard Rasmussen, 73, apparently believed in wearing face masks for protection and had his first dose of Pfizer vaccine in early January. “He was very excited to get his vaccine,” she said.
However, Rasmussen tested positive for the virus ten days later and died on February 19 before receiving a second dose, Julie Rasmussen said. His final decline was incredible because of his speed, she said.
“And now I’m alone,” Rasmussen said in an email interview. “He was my best friend. We send an SMS every day. I have no siblings. No husband / boyfriend. He was unmarried. I’m alone looking for the legal system and packing his house. ”
The same day Rasmussen died, Oklahoma City’s Deidre Love Sullens stood in the icy, snow-covered parking lot of a vaccine clinic amid the grief of both her mother, Catherine Douglas, 65, and stepfather, Asa Bartlett Douglas. , lost. 58, to COVID-19 in a period of 16 days before they could get shots.
‘They, and I, viewed the vaccine as the only life-changing factor that would enable us to see each other in person again. That was our goal. “We were all aiming to get the vaccine so that we could get back together, so that my mother could play with my daughter again, so that maybe we could go to my grandmother’s in the old age home and not be limited to window visits,” Sullens said. in an interview emailed.
On that cold February day, with a few doses left because bad weather others could not make appointments, a worker called Sullens to the clinic to be immunized. Sullens said she was overwhelmed by tears and a “surrealistic sense of disbelief” when she entered.
“My mind was thinking, ‘If only my parents could last two months extra, they’ll be vaccinated here too. They will live. They will be here with me, ” she said.