Wife warns Americans to get vaccinated as anti-vaxx husband battles Covid in hospital

As Covid-19 infection rates soar across the United States, a Mississippi woman is pleading with people to get vaccinated after her husband fell severely ill with the virus.

William Ball, 52, suffered a heart attack last month, and while recovering in hospital he caught Covid-19.

His wife Alicia was also infected with the virus, but crucially she had already received her Covid jabs while Mr Ball refused to get them.

She told CBS This Morning her unvaccinated husband is in an “extremely bad” condition in hospital.

“He can’t even get up,” she said.

“We didn’t [think the virus was serious] either, at first. I’m not gonna lie. We had no idea.”

In a Facebook post detailing her husband’s illness, she said her family was in need of “prayers and healing”.

“My sweet husband is in day 8 in the hospital and will be there for a while,” she wrote on July 16.

He was suffering from pneumonia and “Covid lung”.

“There are also several men in our church fighting the same thing.”

She said she was still feeling tired but otherwise had made a full recovery from the illness.

Alicia said after witnessing her husband become severely ill was now trying to educate others.

“We have really tried to, after this, talk to as many of our friends and family as possible that they should get it. I never really realised how bad it would be – how bad this Delta variant would be,” she told CNN.

Mississippi has the lowest rate of vaccination of any state in the country. Just 34.4 per cent of residents have been fully vaccinated, compared to 49.8 per cent nationwide.

At the St. Dominic-Jackson Memorial Hospital in Jackson, Mississippi, where Mr Ball is battling the illness, 59 Covid patients are hospitalised.

Doctors have stopped allowing in-person visits to prevent the virus’s spread.

The director of hospital medicine Dr. Teri Oakes Dyess told CBS This Morning people with underlying conditions who had received both shots may still be getting sick.

“We don’t know if they got a full antibody response; their immune system may be weakened," Dr Dyess said.

“It’s making us even come back and question should we be giving booster doses now to those with underlying medical conditions?"

The rate of coronavirus infections is about twice as high in Republican counties as in Democrat counties amid a surge in cases due to the Delta variant, a study by the Washington Post found.