In undervaccinated swaths of Arkansas, COVID-19 upends life all over again
July 17, 2021 at 10:43 am Updated July 18, 2021 at 9:08 am
By
SHARON LaFRANIERE
The New York Times
MOUNTAIN HOME, Ark. — When the boat factory in this leafy Ozark Mountains city offered free coronavirus vaccinations this spring, Susan Johnson, 62, a receptionist there, declined the offer, figuring she was protected as long as she never left her house without a mask.
Linda Marion, 68, a widow with chronic pulmonary disease, worried that a vaccination might actually trigger COVID-19 and kill her. Barbara Billigmeier, 74, an avid golfer who retired here from California, believed she did not need it because “I never get sick.”
This month, all three were patients on 2 West, an overflow ward that is now largely devoted to treating COVID-19 at Baxter Regional Medical Center, the largest hospital in north-central Arkansas. Billigmeier said the scariest part was that “you can’t breathe.” For 10 days, Johnson had relied on supplemental oxygen being fed to her lungs through nasal tubes.
Marion said that at one point, she felt so sick and frightened that she wanted to give up. “It was just terrible,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t take it.”
Yet despite their ordeals, none of them changed their minds about getting vaccinated. “It’s just too new,” Billigmeier said. “It is like an experiment.”
While much of the nation tiptoes toward normalcy, the coronavirus is again swamping hospitals in places like Mountain Home, a city of fewer than 13,000 people not far from the Missouri border. A principal reason, health officials say, is the emergence of the new, far more contagious delta variant, which now accounts for more than half of new infections in the United States.
The variant has highlighted a new divide in America, between communities with high vaccination rates, where it causes hardly a ripple, and those like Mountain Home that are undervaccinated, where it threatens to upend life all over again. Part of the country is breathing a sigh of relief; part is holding its breath.
While infections rose in more than half the nation’s counties last week, those with low vaccination rates were far more likely to see bigger jumps. Among the 25 counties with the sharpest increases in cases, all but one had vaccinated under 40% of residents, and 16 had vaccinated under 30%, a New York Times analysis found.
In Baxter County, where the hospital is, fewer than one-third of residents are fully vaccinated — below both the state and the national averages. Even fewer people are protected in surrounding counties that the hospital serves.
“It’s absolutely flooded,” said Dr. Rebecca Martin, a pulmonologist, as she made the rounds of 2 West one morning last week.
In the first half of June, the hospital averaged only one or two COVID-19 patients a day. On Thursday, 22 of the unit’s 32 beds were filled with coronavirus patients. Five more were in intensive care. In a single week, the number of COVID-19 patients had jumped by one-third.
Overall, Arkansas ranks near the bottom of states in the share of population that is vaccinated. Only 44% of residents have received at least one shot.
“Boy, we’ve tried just about everything we can think of,” a retired National Guard colonel, Robert Ator, who runs the state’s vaccination effort, said in an interview. For about 1 in 3 residents, he said, “I don’t think there’s a thing in the world we could do to get them to get vaccinated.”
For that, the state is paying a price. Hospitalizations have quadrupled since mid-May. More than one-third of patients are in intensive care. Deaths, a lagging indicator, are also expected to rise, health officials said.
Dr. José R. Romero, the state health director, said he still believed enough Arkansans were vaccinated, or immune from having contracted COVID-19, that the “darkest days” of December and January were behind them. “What I’m concerned about now is we’ll have a rise or surge,” he said, “then winter is going to add another surge, so we’re going to have a surge on top of a surge.” |
