Hospital CEOs around Tennessee have been writing increasingly desperate pleas for people to get vaccinated and mask up to slow a wave of infectious that may be the state’s biggest yet. Roughly 90% of the more than 2,500 hospitalized statewide are not vaccinated.
On Friday, 10 hospital leaders in Middle Tennessee fired off a joint missive.
“We are banding together in one unified voice to ask you, to beg you, to get vaccinated against COVID-19,” says the letter, signed by the large medical center CEOs in Nashville as well as those from smaller communities, including the Henry County Medical Center in Paris, Tenn.
“We have seen, firsthand, the unnecessary suffering this horrible disease wreaks on the human body. We have had many patients in our ICUs, with machines keeping them alive, who wished they had gotten the vaccine but at that point it’s just too late.”
Fatalities are again spiking, as has happened in previous waves, with 51 new deaths reported in the past 24 hours.
The Tennessee Hospital Association amped up its vaccine encouragement earlier this week with a collective statement.
“Vaccination against serious communicable diseases is a long-standing public health practice responsible for the eradication of smallpox, the near eradication of polio, and millions of lives saved worldwide from these and other diseases like measles, rubella, tetanus and diphtheria,” the organization said.
“Widespread COVID-19 vaccination is especially important to protect individuals who cannot mount a strong response to vaccination themselves.”
Personal pleas
Individual CEOs have also been making their cases through social media this week. They call on people to put aside politics, take the vaccine and wear a mask — particularly in schools where most students can’t get their shots yet.
“I’m a freedom loving, 2nd amendment supporting, federalist Republican, and while I strongly disagree with those who feel masking is an infringement on liberty, I do understand where these folks are coming from,” writes Alan Levine, CEO of Ballad Health in northeast Tennessee. “That having been said: Political choices come with tradeoffs.”
At least at the executive level, they have sidestepped a direct confrontation with Gov. Bill Lee, who has allowed parents to opt out their children from mask mandates for no reason.
“The die is already being cast,” Levine says, so parents of children in schools where few are masked should assume they are being exposed. But even if they don’t develop symptoms, he warns to watch for symptoms of a mysterious syndrome called MIS-C that seems to accompany COVID in kids, even if the virus didn’t make them sick.
Increasingly, hospitals officials are speaking more directly about just how close they are to a breaking point and with more frankness even than during the winter surge, when the assumption was that the newly available vaccine would resolve most capacity issues.
Sumner Regional Medical Center says the situation has never been worse, with 40% of all its patients suffering from COVID. And this is from the hospital that cared for dozens of elderly patients in one of the first outbreaks at a nearby nursing home.
“We are doing everything we can to manage the rapid increase in patients while also continuing to care for the ongoing, non-COVID-19 healthcare needs of our community,” CEO Susan Peach writes, noting that just 38% of residents in the county are fully vaccinated. “Despite these efforts, our system is strained, and our people are tired. I won’t sugar coat it. … These are dark days.”
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