Covid-19 patients being treated at WVU Medicine J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, who are the sickest of the sick, end up in the ECMO program. ECMO stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.
It is one of the most advanced forms of life support available to patients experiencing acute failure of the cardio-respiratory system. Doctors use heart-lung machines to oxygenate the blood outside the body and then pump it back into the patient.
This is where Dr. Jeremiah Hayanga, the thoracic surgeon who is the director of the ECMO program, hears the sick bed conversions of patients who did not get the Covid vaccine.
“We’ve seen patients who adamantly refused to get vaccinated,” Dr. Hayanga said on MetroNews Talkline Thursday. “There were many reasons that patients… used as rationale for not getting vaccinated.”
However, becoming deathly ill causes the patients to reconsider their decisions.
“Uniformly, to a person, each of them has declared that they wished that they had gotten vaccinated… because they would have had a less turbulent course of illness and (it) may have even prevented it all together,” he said.
That story is being repeated in hospital Covid wards across the country.
Covid hospitalizations are surging in Arkansas where only 38 percent of the population is fully vaccinated. Dr. Ryan Dare at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences told NBC News that virtually all their Covid patients are unvaccinated.
“It is heart-wrenching to see unvaccinated individuals come to the hospital with regret,” Dare said. They are patients who, “if they could do it all over again, would have had the vaccine in a second.”
Just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are no—or at least very few—anti-vaxers in the intensive care unit, hooked up to ventilators or lying immobile while a machine reoxygenates their blood.
This trend could be slowed, or even reversed, if otherwise healthy individuals would heed the sound medical advice from health care professionals and get the vaccine. In West Virginia, time is running out for staying ahead of another surge.
The vaccination rate remains essentially stalled while the number of Covid cases continues to increase. West Virginia now has over 5,000 active cases, five times the number of just a few weeks ago. Hospitalizations for Covid are at their highest level since last fall.
“It is not the direction we were hoping for,” said Dr. Hayanga.
Nor anyone else, especially those West Virginians who, for whatever reason, decided not to get vaccinated and found themselves in Dr. Hayanga’s ECMO unit, deathly ill and haunted by regrets.