The Vax Of Life, Con't

People are dying in ICUs, folks. They go there to die from Delta because they refused the vaccine. One such woman who is in an ICU in the Deep South is the aunt of Sports Illustrated college football writer Ross Dellenger, who absolutely believes his failure to convince his aunt to get vaccinated will kill her.

In normal times, the ICU is a dreadful place.

Sickness lingers like a fog. You can feel it, sense it, even hear it—the machinery pumping, the alarms ringing, the nurses scrambling.

In pandemic times, the ICU is chilling. Death lives here.

Medical staff members wear green biohazard suits, face shields, latex gloves and shoe coverings. Strips of red tape—“ISOLATION,” they read—mark the windows and doors of individual rooms.

Behind each is a patient who cannot breathe on their own, kept alive by a ventilation machine that is connected to an invasive tube running down their windpipe and into the lungs. Each room is almost identical: a person, some on their stomachs and others on their backs, sedated and paralyzed, roughly a dozen patches and pipes protruding from them, blankets hiding their naked bodies.

Most of them will not make it out of here, the nurse tells me. In fact, at this particular ICU on the Southern Gulf Coast, COVID-19 patients needing a ventilator have a fatality rate approaching 100%. Over the last year, hundreds of them spent time here. Seven of them survived.

“I wish people could walk in my shoes for a day,” the nurse muffles through a mask.

The nurse is nice, but blunt. She’s frustrated like so many in the medical community, she says. In this ICU, there are 25 patients battling COVID-19. She pauses before finishing the thought: 24 of them are unvaccinated.

That includes the patient before her, the one with braided red curls, pale skin, the one with rosaries draped over her bedside, lying flat on her stomach, her left ear and cheek exposed, a tube inserted in her mouth filling her lungs with oxygen.

She is in her 40s, a mother to a teenager. A wife to a husband. A daughter to an 81-year old mom. A sister to three older siblings. A friend to hundreds.

And an aunt, a godmother and a kindred spirit to one lucky nephew.

Me.

Normally, I write about college football for Sports Illustrated. As the son of a longtime high school football coach, I’ve always been passionate about sports. My stories usually include words like touchdown, field goal and kickoff—not ICU, illness and death.

This isn’t a story about a vaccine. It isn’t a story about a virus. And it isn’t a story about one single person. It is a story about them all.

 

It's a grim way to start the week, but as we observed the 20th anniversary of thousands of preventable deaths from 9/11/01, we have yet to discuss as a country the thousands of preventable deaths from 9/11/21 from COVID.

 

And 9/12.

 

And today. 

And in the weeks and months ahead.