The protesters who have spent so much time in the last month fighting the statewide vaccine mandate for health care workers say they are standing up for individual rights.
But what about the right to spend time with your family rather than work another shift? What about the right to have a break after months and months of overtime and extra duties? What about the right to do anything but move from one frightfully sick patient to the next knowing that not all of them will make it home?
What about the right to see a light at the end of this very long tunnel, as long as the people in the community you’ve pledged to serve take the precautions necessitated by COVID-19?
Because too few Mainers are vaccinated, and because of the high transmissibility of the delta variant, health care workers are seeing those rights trampled, and themselves trapped in a bad cycle and heading for worse.
While a relative few may leave health care when the mandate begins, the remainder will be left to deal with a crisis driven by those who have chosen not to get the vaccine.
Fully vaccinated people are far less likely to get the virus that the unvaccinated, and when they do the presence of the vaccine makes it an almost certainty that they won’t end up in the hospital.
Indeed, the Northern Light Health Network, which includes Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, said recently it was treating 47 people for COVID, of which 44 were unvaccinated. Of the 25 in critical care, 24 were unvaccinated.
The same holds true at MaineHealth, where the majority of COVID patients are unvaccinated, particularly in critical care, as well as around the country.
A recent CDC study found that unvaccinated people are 29 times more likely to end up hospitalized from COVID-19.
That means it is the unvaccinated who are placing remarkable challenges at the feet of health care workers. It is the unvaccinated who are forcing doctors, nurses, nursing assistants and others to work shift after shift caring for an increasing number of very ill patients, and covering for their colleagues when they suffer exhaustion, or catch COVID themselves.
In hotspots like Louisiana, hospitals are dealing with more patients than they can handle. They’ve already suspended non-urgent procedures, and in some places have even had to turn away patients with life-threatening emergencies.
Maine has had among the lowest COVID infection and death rates throughout the pandemic, but with pockets of the state still with low vaccination rates, we remain vulnerable to such outbreaks.
Even now, with Maine’s caseload low relative to other states, hospitals are stretched thin. At Maine Medical Center — where nurses recently criticized the hospital for withdrawing benefits meant to protect workers during the pandemic, an inexplicable move when cases are skyrocketing — one said the nurses are “exhausted, frustrated and stretched to their physical and emotional limits.”
Hospitalizations from COVID are high and rising. On Wednesday, Maine recorded 433 new cases, the highest daily total in four months. On Thursday, it was 624 more.
Some of them, nearly all unvaccinated, will end up in the hospital, where they’ll add to the exhaustion and frustration felt by their neighbors on the hospital staff.
And if there are too many patients, care for all patients will suffer, and people with other emergencies might find themselves out of luck when they seek help — they’ll be your neighbors too.
So for the sake of health care workers who have weathered so much since last March, and who continue to shoulder the burdens of the pandemic, get the vaccine.
No one should want to contribute to this crisis. Everyone has the power to help stop it.
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