Louisiana nurse shares emotional plea over Covid vaccines

A nurse from Louisiana has shared an emotional appeal for people to get vaccinated against Covid-19 after witnessing so many deaths in hospital wards.

Felicia Croft, a nurse at Willis-Knight Medical Center in the town of Shreveport, posted a video on social media about the emotional turmoil prompted by watching people die day after day due to coronavirus.

“I can say today was probably one of the most emotionally hard days since the pandemic started, the Delta wave that we’re seeing now,” Ms Croft said.

Ms Croft spoke about how she had worked in covid wards since the start of the pandemic, saying it was getting increasingly more difficult to cope. She attributed a significant aspect of this being down to ICU patients being much younger than before.

“The Delta wave that we’re seeing now, people are younger and sicker, and we’re intubating and losing people that are my age and younger, people with kids that are my kids’ age that are never going to see their kids graduate,” she said.

Last month, CDC Director Dr Rochelle Walensky shared preliminary data that found 99.5 per cent of those dying from coronavirus were unvaccinated.

No timeframe was given for this figure but she went on to warn about the threat of the Delta variant. Later in the month, Dr Walensky said, “This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated” while appearing at a White House press briefing.

Louisiana has some of the lowest vaccine turn out in the US as only 42 per cent of people are fully vaccinated against Covid, according to numbers from the Louisiana Department of Health.

According to CDC data from last week, 60 per cent of US residents above the age of 12 are fully vaccinated.

Additionally, Louisiana has the highest amount of hospitalisations as currently 1,400 people have been admitted for treatment with the virus. It has a case rate of 89 per 100,000 people.

Ms Croft’s daughter Macy, 14, has also been affected recently, as the nurse explained in the video on 31 July.

“She came to me, said ‘Mom, we need to pray for my friend’s parents’ and her friend’s parents are in my ICU and one of them may not go home,” Ms Croft said.

She explained the agony of potentially not being able to save the friends’ parents, saying: “I cannot even explain how that feels, as a nurse and as a mom.

“So many of the people that we are getting haven’t been vaccinated. And just to know that there’s something that could help and people aren’t taking advantage of it.”

Ms Croft acknowledged that they had been getting patients who had been vaccinated, but said that their sickness was much less severe and that they were less likely to die from coronavirus.

“They usually go home to raise their kids and to hug their husband or their wife.” she said.

Ms Croft said that she felt “defeat” after watching people die knowing they could have been vaccinated against Covid.

“I can’t explain the feeling of defeat when you pour everything, you do everything into a patient and it’s not enough, and then to know that they could have got vaccinated and it could have made a difference,” she said.

On 2 August, Governor John Bel Edwards made the state the first to reintroduce the indoor mask mandate, who while in the announcement urged people to get vaccinated against covid.

“I am pleading with unvaccinated Louisianans to get their shot as soon as they can to protect themselves. We can end this nightmare, but it is going to take all of us working together to do it,” he said.

Currently, nearly 80 per cent of the country is facing CDC advice to wear mask indoors, as in counties marked ‘substantial’ or ‘high’, it is recommended to wear a face covering while inside.

According to data from the The New York Times, 613,436 people have died in the US from coronavirus.