‘This is a tragedy’ - Sonora doctor treating COVID-19 patients urges vaccination
Dr. Artin Mahmoudi sees the ravages of the latest COVID-19 surge everyday in the intensive care unit at Adventist Health Sonora.
Mahmoudi said in an interview on Monday afternoon that he had a 27-year-old resident die from the deadly virus while in the hospital’s ICU earlier that day.
“It’s uncomfortable to watch someone younger than you die, and you can’t do anything about it,” he said. “It’s beyond tragic.”
All of the beds in the hospital’s ICU were filled with COVID-19 patients on Monday, with Mahmoudi and his team doing what they could to save their lives.
Mahmoudi said, speaking on behalf of himself and not the hospital where he’s worked for more than eight years, the most tragic part about the latest surge of hospitalizations and deaths in the county is how they could have been entirely prevented through vaccination.
“Unfortunately, the way we are creating vacancies in the ICU is by people dying, not going home,” he said. “We are losing people who should not have been lost had they got
ten vaccinated.”
At least six county residents had died from the virus in the past week as of Tuesday morning, all of whom were said to be unvaccinated.
The county had 79 total deaths since the start of the pandemic as of Tuesday morning, including the 27-year-old man, who public health officials said had no apparent underlying health conditions.
“It's very unpredictable,” Mahmoudi said of how people are affected by the novel coronavirus, of which much is still medically unknown. “The person who passed away today is not the only young person who got very sick and died.”
Mahmoudi said there will likely be many additional deaths and hospitalizations in the county unless more people “realize this is not a joke.”
“If you look at our numbers, they're not plateauing,” he said. “The only way this will plateau is if people realize this is a real disease and take action.”
The quickest and most effective way that Mahmoudi said people can become a part of the fight against COVID-19 is through getting vaccinated if they haven't done so yet.
While people can still get COVID-19 if they are vaccinated, Mahmoudi said the numbers he's seen at the hospital in recent months are proving them to be 98% to 99% effective at preventing a trip to the ICU or worse.
Mahmoudi said there is no debate on the safety and benefits of getting vaccinated among people in the medical community like himself and his team who care for COVID-19 patients in the hospital's ICU.
“Those of us who see COVID everyday and take care of people with COVID everyday and get to stand next to the patients as they're dying, we have zero questions,” he said. “The vaccine is not controversial.”
However, the vaccine has proven to be a polarizing topic for many in the community as of late.
As Mahmoudi was being interviewed on Monday, a protest organized by nurses at Adventist Health Sonora was being held in downtown Sonora's Courthouse Square (see story, Page A1) against the California state health officer's recent order mandating all health care workers get vaccinated by Sept. 30.
People also spoke at a county Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday both for and against a proposed policy that would require the county's 600-plus employees to show proof they are vaccinated or submit to weekly testing for COVID-19.
Mahmoudi said he believes the vast majority of people still resistant to getting vaccinated are good, decent people who have had access to bad information or have been influenced by a smaller percentage of “active agitators.”
“These few percentage points are the ones making life difficult for the rest of the community,” he said. “Frankly, they should be held accountable for all these deaths.”
The longer and worse the pandemic gets, the harder the strain on the county's health care workers like Mahmoudi and his team, some of whom he said have told him they are looking into other careers.
Even people who are most likely to not get severely ill are spreading the disease to people who can and increasing a chance of the virus mutating into a variant that's more evasive against the vaccines, Mahmoudi said.
Mahmoudi likened the current battle against the deadly virus to how many Americans were opposed to entering World War II before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
“There were a whole bunch of people saying let's watch from the side, let's stay neutral, until we realized that by staying out we were helping the evil that was Hitler,” he said. “We are facing an equivalent process. There are no neutral people in this fight. There are people who are actively working to end this pandemic, and there are people who are working to promote this pandemic.
“If a person resists getting the vaccine, they are working to promote the pandemic. There are no neutral people.”