These patients tell their doctors that the reason they didn't take the vaccine is because they got an email from a friend or read something on Facebook.
Excerpt:
“And now all you really see is their fear and their regret. And even though I may walk into the room thinking, ‘Okay, this is your fault, you did this to yourself,’ when I leave the room, I just see a person that’s really suffering, and that is so regretful for the choice that they made.”
Cobia said that the strain wears on healthcare workers after the trauma of 2020 and 2021.
“It’s really hard because all of us physicians and other medical staff, we’ve been doing this for a long time and all of us are very, at this point, tired and emotionally drained and cynical,” she said.
Cobia said the current wave of Delta patients reminds her of the time in October and November of 2020, just before Alabama’s peak of coronavirus cases and deaths.
“What we saw in December 2020, and January 2021, that was the absolute peak, the height of the pandemic, where I was signing 10 death certificates a day,” she said. “Now, it’s certainly not like that, but it’s very reminiscent of probably October, November of 2020, where we know there’s a lot of big things coming up.”
Cobia worries that the upcoming school year will lead to a similar surge.
“All these kids are about to go back to school. No mask mandates are in place at all, 70% of Alabama is unvaccinated. Of course, no kids are vaccinated for the most part because they can’t be,” Cobia said. “So it feels like impending doom, basically.”
Dr. Brytney Cobia and family
Drs. Miles and Brytney Cobia with children Carter and Claire.
Cobia also had a personal experience with the virus, contracting it in July while 27 weeks pregnant with her second child. Her symptoms were mild and the child, Carter, was delivered early out of caution but suffered no serious complications.
Her husband, Miles, is also a physician, and the couple says they were both extremely cautious about wearing protective equipment but one of them still caught the virus and gave it to the other, as well as other family members.
“We still went to work but we masked 100% of the time,” Cobia said. “We didn’t go anywhere or do anything, we ordered through Shipt for all of our groceries, we did nothing at the time.”
Cobia said she delivered in September without incident and got the vaccine herself in December when it was made available to healthcare workers.
“I did not hesitate to get it,” she said. “There was a lot unknown at that time, because I was still breastfeeding about whether that was safe or not. I talked to as many other physician colleagues as I could and spoke with my OB as far as data that she had available and decided to continue breastfeeding after vaccination.”
Read More: Unvaccinated represent 96% of Alabama COVID deaths since April
For people who are hesitant to receive the vaccine, Cobia recommends speaking to their primary care physician about their concerns, just as she did.
“I try to be very non-judgmental when I’m getting a new COVID patient that’s unvaccinated, but I really just started asking them, ‘Why haven’t you gotten the vaccine?’ And I’ll just ask it point blank, in the least judgmental way possible,” she said. “And most of them, they’re very honest, they give me answers. ‘I talked to this person, I saw this thing on Facebook, I got this email, I saw this on the news,’ you know, these are all the reasons that I didn’t get vaccinated.
“And the one question that I always ask them is, did you make an appointment with your primary care doctor and ask them for their opinion on whether or not you should receive the vaccine? And so far, nobody has answered yes to that question.”
