After months of hoping to receive COVID-19 immunization and then weeks of fighting the disease after never coming, Air Force veteran Diane Drewes took her last breath at an Ohio hospice center when she called the phone. She was a health worker who called to schedule her first appointment for a coronavirus shot.
Drewes’ daughter, Laura Brown, was stunned by the January call, but gave no chance on the phone and did not even explain that her 75-year-old mother was about to die. It just didn’t make sense, she said.
“But my sister and I were upset that he came too late,” Brown said. “It seemed like the final insult.”
More than 247,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the United States since vaccines first became available in mid-December. Officials have warned that the release of enough vaccines to boost the population’s immunity would take months. And given the extremely limited initial supply of the vaccine and the virus that is spreading across the country over the winter, it has been a sad reality that some would contract COVID-19 and die before being inoculated.
With polls showing a large percentage of the US population complained about vaccines, it is impossible to say exactly how many of the dead would have wanted an immunization. But Brown said her mother wanted her – desperately. Other families have similar, frightening stories about infected loved ones after months of staying safe and then dying before receiving a dose.
Charlotte Crawford, who spent 40 years working in the microbiology lab at Dallas’ Parkland Hospital, was completely immunized in January after receiving two doses of the Modern vaccine because of her work. However, she then endured the agony of chasing her husband and two adult children by contracting COVID-19 and dying before they could be shot.
Henry Royce Crawford, 65, had an appointment for a vaccine when he became ill, his widow said. Their children, 33-year-old Roycie Crawford and 38-year-old Natalia Crawford, wanted the shot, but could not find another when they became ill and died, Crawford said.
The days of their deaths in late February and early March seem like a headache for Crawford; she is still trying to figure out what happened, while pleading with anyone who listens to get vaccinated 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 United States have received at least one dose of vaccine, only 53 million are fully vaccinated, or about 16 percent of the nation’s population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
With the doses now widely available, photography continues at an accelerated pace. More than a dozen states have opened vaccine eligibility for all adults amid an increase in virus cases.
Only the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is complete after a single dose, so the waiting time between the first and second vaccine with both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines leaves a period of weeks in which a beneficiary remains vulnerable and infected.
The wait for the second shot turned out to be too long for Richard Rasmussen of Las Vegas, said her daughter Julie Rasmussen.
Richard Rasmussen, 73, fervently believed in wearing protective masks and received 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 10 days later and died on Feb. 19 before receiving a second dose, Julie Rasmussen said. His final decline was astonishing for his speed, she said.
“And now I’m alone,” Rasmussen said in an email interview. “He was my best friend. I texted every day, all day. I have no siblings. No husband / boyfriend. He was alone. I am alone navigating the legal system and packing his house.”
On the same day that Rasmussen died, Deidre Love Sullens of Oklahoma City was sitting in the frozen, snow-covered parking lot of a vaccine clinic amid the grief of losing both his mother, Catherine Douglas, 65 and stepfather, Asa Bartlett Douglas, 58, to COVID-19 within 16 days before they could be shot.
“They and I saw the vaccine as the only life-changing factor that would allow us to see each other again in person. It was our goal. We all set out to get the vaccine so we could get together again so my mother could play with my daughter again, so we could visit our grandmother in the nursing home and not be limited to visits. at the window, ”Sullens said in an e-mail interview.
On that cold February day, with a few spare doses, because the bad weather prevented others from making appointments, a worker called Sullens to the clinic to be immunized. Sullens said she was overwhelmed with tears and a “surreal sense of distrust” when she entered.
“My mind was thinking, ‘If only my parents could last another two months … they would be here to get the vaccine too. He would be alive. They will be here with me, “she said.