“When I call time of death, I hug their family and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to get vaccinated. They cry. They thought it was a hoax,” Cobia said.
“I actually cried a little when I read that story. A lot of us have experienced some variation of that story, those of us working in hospitals in the past year,” said Andrea Muir.
Muir is a registered nurse at Sharp Memorial in San Diego and said she’s seeing firsthand an increase in the number of COVID-19 patients.
Muir recalled the story of an unvaccinated man whose oxygen levels were dropping and fought off nurses as they tried desperately to help him.
Nurses that I m acquainted with are so tired. We have education fatigue and on top of it, physical, mental and emotional fatigue from actually doing this work inside the hospital, said Muir.
Muir explained how the biggest hurdle inside hospitals is the overflowing patients with not enough ICU nurses to treat them. We can put up endless tents in the parking lot, we can move other patients out to different areas so that we can have more room for ICU level patients, said Muir. But, you cannot simply train a nurse or any other health care worker for a couple of days and then stick them in an ICU.