COVID-19 is still deadly real.
For a few minutes, we were just two drugstore customers sitting next to each other, making small talk.
She was waiting for her doctor’s office to confirm a prescription. I was waiting for two scheduled vaccinations: one for the flu and the other an updated COVID-19 booster, which recently became available for free and can offer powerful protection against serious illness.
Before she knew why I was there, we talked about the great staff at this pharmacy. Then she pointed to a medical device, sitting on the counter. “I make that.”
I live for these conversations. I introduced myself, and in the next few minutes I learned that she had been doing this work for seven years, and that in the early months of the pandemic she was considered an essential worker. For just four weeks, in late April and early May 2020, she received $2 more an hour. For months, she worked so much overtime on the assembly line that her net pay was over $1,000.
'You haven't been vaccinated?'
As we talked, two lines of customers began to grow. Not uncommon in the 4 o’clock hour, when a lot of people are heading home after a day’s work. The pharmacy clerk walked over to me with a clipboard and instructed me to fill out the consent form. “For both your flu and COVID shots,” she said, smiling.
In that moment, my newfound friend dumped me. “I would never put that poison in my body,” she said.
I turned to look at her. “You haven’t been vaccinated against COVID?”
“Nope,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s a government conspiracy. No worse than the flu.”
A woman standing about 6 feet away leaned over her cart, nodding. “Absolutely. It’s a government hoax. Nobody dies of COVID.”
You know that moment when you feel a shift inside, when you know you’ve just reached your limit? That was me, in that drugstore. I am not one to argue with strangers in a store, except on behalf of bullied employees. But surviving three years of this pandemic has changed me, I learned this week.
“Three of my friends died from COVID,” I said, loudly.
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The woman leaning over the cart was defiant. “No, they didn’t. The hospital is paid $3,000 a patient to tell you they died of COVID. Never happened.” The woman sitting next to me nodded. “Exactly.”
No one said a word, but everyone was listening.
“That is false,” I said. “That is a lie.”
Both women mumbled something about sheep and fell silent. I sat there for another 10 minutes, aware of other customers’ discomfort and not caring a bit. In the face of false, dangerous rhetoric, we don’t owe anyone our silence.
COVID is deadly real, not a hoax
More than a million Americans have died from COVID-19. I sat there and kept thinking about my three friends, all of whom died in the early days of the pandemic, and the medical professionals who tried to save them even when they knew they couldn’t.
One of those friends was Philip Kachersky, whom I had known since high school. After he was rushed to the hospital, his wife, Erin, had to wait for 23 days before she was allowed to see him. She told me on Thursday that she will never forget the sight of his blackened limbs. Doctors had discussed with her amputating both of Philip's legs, his right arm and fingers from his left hand.
Doctors also told her he had no brain activity. Erin knew what she had to do. There would be no amputations. Her Philip was already gone.
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Last December, I wrote a column about Amy Rosenberg, a nurse of more than 30 years’ experience who, for almost two years, had been working full-time in a COVID unit in a hospital near Dayton, Ohio. Ten months after the rollout of the COVID vaccine, she told me, most of her patients who were dying were unvaccinated.
“They’re educated people. The patient comes in, the families come in, they’re very opinionated about being unvaccinated: ‘Oh, this is a conspiracy.’ ‘They don’t have COVID.’ You get so many questions: Why can’t you use ivermectin? Or hydroxychloroquine? We tell them we don’t do that. We find it has negative effects.”
As we know from the relentless coverage of those early months of the pandemic, so many COVID patients died isolated from anyone who loved them. Far too many of them spent their final moments alone, in wards overwhelmed by the pandemic. Rosenberg tried to be the nurse holding their hands at the end as often as she could.
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“I can’t tell you how many have died, but I can tell you on a hand or two how many lived,” she told me. “I’ve lost more patients in these last two years than in the previous 30 years combined.”
Try telling her this is a hoax.
Here in Ohio, only 59.51% of residents are fully vaccinated for COVID-19. That puts us slightly ahead of West Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama, but far behind Rhode Island (85.14%), Massachusetts (81.36%) and New York (78.03%).
Nationally, less than half of eligible Americans have received a single booster.
Medical experts warn that we could see another COVID surge this fall. It migh not be as severe, but none of them are making promises because variants are unpredictable.
Get your booster. Do it for those who never had the chance. Do it for the people in your life who want you to live.
USA TODAY columnist Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose novel, “The Daughters of Erietown,” is a New York Times bestseller. You can reach her at CSchultz@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @ConnieSchultz
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: COVID vaccine boosters best defense we have in pandemic
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