And then this, via WJXT - Jacksonville:
Cha-ching, motherfucker
Meanwhile, we can go on pleading with people to get vaxxed up.
‘I’m begging you. ... Take that shot.’
As covid-19 surges in unvaccinated Alabama, the intimate conversations between doctors and patients have taken on a new urgency
CENTREVILLE, Ala. — Cases were spiking again. Hospitals were filling up again. The latest wave of the coronavirus pandemic was raging across Alabama, and inside a rural clinic in one of the state’s least-vaccinated counties, a doctor scanned a chart for her first case of the day: 84 years old. A routine exam. Unvaccinated.
“Mr. Potts,” Lacy Smith said, greeting a man in dark slacks and a maroon T-shirt leaning on a cane. “How’ve you been feeling?”
Even at the most urgent of moments, it was the most ordinary of questions because of what the doctor understood: that if Alabama had any chance of turning things around at this point, it was no longer a matter of what Dr. Fauci said on CNN, or what some celebrity posted on Twitter but rather what was about to happen now, a delicate conversation between a doctor and a patient, the vaccines in a cooler down the hall just in case. Between Smith and two colleagues, there were 10 unvaccinated people on the schedule this day, and the first was Potts.
“Oh, pretty good, considering my age and the heat,” he replied as the doctor reminded herself to be patient, because the question wasn’t whether to bring up the vaccine, only how.
She asked about his garden. They discussed his vitals.
“So,” she finally said. “What are your current thoughts about the covid vaccine?”
“People getting pretty sick, aren’t they?” he said.
“Super sick, especially with this delta,” she said, referring to the variant.
“That shot I get for the shingles, that’s a vaccine too, ain’t it?” he said.
All similar, the doctor said, as she had in their three prior conversations.
“The benefits outweigh the other side, don’t it?” Potts said.
“Very much so, yes sir,” she said, letting a promising silence hang in the air.
He tapped his cane on the floor. “I believe I’ll think on it,” he said, and so the morning began with a no as the situation in Alabama continued to degenerate. An average of nearly 3,000 new covid-19 cases a day.
Roughly 65 percent of the population is still not fully vaccinated. And now, as Smith’s colleague John Waits headed into Exam Room 4, the message was spreading that nearly every hospital in the state was turning away emergencies because they were too busy with covid, as had first happened a few days before, when a doctor had to do CPR on a man in the back of a pickup truck as she waited for an emergency room to open up, which it never did, and the man died.
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