After months of expecting to receive a COVID-19 immunization and then weeks of fighting the disease, after one never came, Air Force veteran Diane Drewes was up to her last breaths at a hospice center in Ohio when the phone rang . She was a healthcare professional calling to make her first appointment for a coronavirus injection.
Drewes’ daughter, Laura Brown, was shocked by the moment of the call in January, but did not attack on the phone or explain that her 75-year-old mother was on the verge of death. It just didn’t make sense, she said.
“But my sister and I were upset because it was too late,” said Brown. “It felt like the final insult.”
More than 247,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the United States since vaccines were made available in mid-December. Authorities warned that distributing enough vaccines to achieve collective immunity would take months. And with the initial supply of the vaccine extremely limited and the virus spreading wildly throughout the country during the winter, it was a sad reality that some would contract COVID-19 and die before being inoculated.
With surveys showing a large percentage of the US population wary of vaccines, it is impossible to say exactly how many of the dead would have even wished for an immunization. But Brown said his mother wanted one – desperately. Other families tell similar and painful stories of loved ones who were infected after months of safety and died before receiving a dose.
Charlotte Crawford, who spent 40 years working in the microbiology laboratory at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, was fully immunized in January after receiving two doses of the Moderna vaccine because of her work. Even so, she endured the agony of seeing her husband and two adult children contract COVID-19 and die before receiving the vaccines.
Henry Royce Crawford, 65, had an appointment for a vaccine when he fell ill, his widow said. Their children, Roycie Crawford, 33, and Natalia Crawford, 38, also wanted the injection, but they still hadn’t found it when they fell ill and died, Crawford said.
The days since their death in late February and early March seem to be a mess for Crawford; she is still trying to find out what happened while begging everyone to hear her to get a vaccine as soon as possible.
“All I know is that I did three funerals in three weeks,” said Crawford, from Forney, Texas.
Although more than 96 million people in the United States have received at least one dose of the vaccine, only 53 million are fully vaccinated, or about 16% of the nation’s population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
With doses now more widely available, injections are taking place at a faster rate. More than a dozen states have opened vaccine eligibility for all adults amid an increase in virus cases.
Only the Johnson & Johnson injection is completed after a dose, so the waiting time between the first and the second injection of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines leaves a period of weeks in which the recipient remains vulnerable and subject to infection.
The wait for a second chance was too long for Richard Rasmussen of Las Vegas, said his daughter Julie Rasmussen.
Richard Rasmussen, 73, fervently believed in the use of face masks for protection and took his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine in early January. “He was very excited to get his vaccine,” she said.
However, Rasmussen tested positive for the virus 10 days later and died on February 19 before receiving a second dose, said Julie Rasmussen. Its final decline was impressive for its speed, she said.
“And now I’m alone,” said Rasmussen in an email interview. “He was my best friend. We text every day, all day. I don’t have any siblings. No husband / boyfriend. He was single. I’m alone browsing the legal system and packing his house.”
On the same day that Rasmussen died, Deidre Love Sullens, of Oklahoma City, was standing in the snow-covered parking lot of a vaccine clinic amid the pain of losing his mother, Catherine Douglas, 65, and stepfather, Asa Bartlett Douglas, 58, for COVID-19 over a period of 16 days before they could get the vaccines.
“They and I saw the vaccine as the only life-changing factor that would allow us to see each other in person again. It was our goal. We all intended to get the vaccine so that we could get together again, so that my mother could play with my daughter again, so that maybe we could visit my grandmother at the nursing home and not be restricted to window visits, ”said Sullens in an interview. conducted by email.
On that cold February day, with a few doses to spare because the bad weather prevented others from making an appointment, an employee called Sullens to the clinic to be immunized. Sullens said she was overcome with tears and a “surreal feeling of disbelief” upon entering.
“My mind was thinking, ‘If only my parents could have endured another two months … they would be here getting the vaccine too. They would be alive. They would be here with me, “” she said.