Unvaccinated hospitalized patients tell docs they regret not getting their shots

'They wish they knew': Unvaccinated hospitalized patients say they regret not getting the shot A year and a half into the pandemic, low vaccination rates and the rise of the delta variant threaten to cripple some hospital systems. NBC News

To describe Dr. Ryan Dare as frustrated would be a gross understatement.

Dare and his colleagues at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock are dealing with a surge in extremely ill Covid-19 patients — one that is "nearly 100 percent preventable."

That's because virtually all of their patients are unvaccinated. And now they wish they had gotten the shots when they had the chance.

"It is heart-wrenching to see unvaccinated individuals come into the hospital with regret," said Dare, an infectious diseases physician. They are patients who, "if they could do it all over again, would have had the vaccine in a second."

Arkansas has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, with less than 35 percent of adults having been fully vaccinated. Now, the state's low vaccine uptake has crashed headlong into the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus, leaving some hospital systems once again teetering on the brink of collapse more than a year into the pandemic.

It's not the only state where progress against the virus has taken a turn.

"We are starting to see some new concerning and emerging trends," Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a briefing Thursday. "Simply put, in areas of low vaccination coverage, cases and hospitalizations are up."

Many of those areas are clustered in Arkansas and neighboring Missouri, along with a handful of states in the Mountain West.

Less than 40 percent of adults are fully vaccinated in Missouri. At Mercy Hospital Springfield, an influx of more than 125 patients has forced administrators to ask other medical systems for extra ventilators and nurses to handle the extra cases.

"It's just a mess," said Dr. Mayrol Juarez, a critical care physician at the hospital. "Everybody in the hospital is doing extra shifts, calling out for other hospitals to help."

Juarez said many of his hospitalized Covid-19 patients are "shocked" that Covid-19 truly exists and that it can make people very sick and even kill them. "A comment they make all the time is that they wish that they knew they were going to end up in the hospital this sick and they would have made a different choice and got the vaccine," he said....