‘We saw a lot of death,’ says Beaufort hospital official as staff gets COVID-19 vaccine
Diane Razo woke up feeling anxious early Monday.
Razo, director of critical care at Beaufort Memorial Hospital, was scheduled to get vaccinated for COVID-19 around 8 a.m.
“I’m still thinking, ‘You know, is this the right thing to do? I know we have a choice,’” Razo recalled.
But soon after getting the shot — a 0.3 milliliter dose of Pfizer and BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine — Razo said she made the correct decision.
“I work in the ICU, and I’ve been on the front lines since March of this pandemic, and if you have seen what we have seen in the ICU, you would know this is the right choice,” she told reporters later Monday.
“It’s just been horrific,” she said. “In the beginning months, March, April and May, I think that we saw a lot of death, frequently. It emotionally scars the staff. ... You can’t even allow (a patient’s) family to come to the bedside, so our staff had become the family of these patients who are passing, and you just can’t imagine day after day what that was like.”
Razo is now urging other critical care workers to get inoculated, after Beaufort Memorial Hospital started to roll out a plan Monday to offer COVID-19 vaccines to its employees.
Shots began about 8 a.m. The hospital received a shipment of 300 Pfizer doses from a state redistribution site over the weekend, according to CEO Russell Baxley.
Pfizer also directly shipped another 975 doses to the hospital on Monday, and Baxley said he’s expecting 200 additional doses from the state site Tuesday.
Baxley — who was vaccinated Monday and said it was “painless” — hopes the medical center can inoculate 600 employees within three days.
And if things go according to plan, he said all of the hospital’s roughly 1,600 staff members could receive the first of two Pfizer doses by the end of next week, if they want the shot. The second dose is administered 21 days after the first. The hospital will continue to place orders with Pfizer in coming weeks, Baxley said.
There’s no vaccine mandate, he said.
“We encourage it,” Baxley said. “There’s going to be some that opt in, some that opt out and some that opt in a little bit later. ... I think there’s a lot of education still yet to be done.”
Health care workers and residents and staff at long-term care facilities are being prioritized for early vaccine distribution, during what’s called Phase 1a. The general public won’t have access to vaccines until sometime in 2021.
South Carolina is expecting only 200,000 to 300,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines by year’s end, giving health officials an extremely limited supply to allocate around the Palmetto State.
That leaves it up to health care workers like Razo, who’s been at Beaufort Memorial Hospital for over 11 years, to weigh whether it’s worth getting a shot now or later, after more people have been vaccinated.
“It’s a personal choice,” she said.
But considering that Pfizer’s vaccine was 95% efficacious during a late-stage clinical trial, she said it made sense to get a shot.
“Let’s protect ourselves so we can continue to protect others around us,” Razo said.
‘Hopefully other people will follow’
Doug Rhodin, director of security at Beaufort Memorial Hospital, settled into a chair after taking off his dress shirt early Monday at the medical center. Jaime Cuff, a nurse practitioner, waited with a needle. Hospital staff ran back and forth down the hall as other employees checked in for vaccine appointments.
Rhodin didn’t flinch as Cuff stuck his upper left arm for a few seconds.
“The main reason why I decided to take it and get the shot,” Rhodin said, “was for my family. I did not want to bring anything home to them.” He has 6-year-old twins.
While Rhodin doesn’t intubate COVID-19 patients in the ICU, he’s around people at the main lobby or emergency room constantly, he said, including those waiting for coronavirus test results who get “upset and anxious.”
“I said my little prayer in the morning. ... I said this is it. I’m going to go forth, I’m going to do it. Hopefully other people will follow,” Rhodin told reporters.
Dr. Louis Plzak, a urologist who’s worked at the hospital for 18 years, registered for the shot last week and was the first person vaccinated Monday.
Plzak said he’s operated on a few coronavirus-positive patients this year during emergency situations, and COVID-19 “makes everything more complicated.”
“Whether you believe that COVID is really a danger or not,” he said, “the one thing that I think we can all universally agree on is the fact that it does have a grip on our society, and anything we can do to take ourselves out of that equation just makes an awful lot of sense. ... We’ve been using vaccines for over 200 years. They work.”
He wasn’t nervous about the shot, Plzak added. It was like any other Monday morning.
“I was just thinking about my coffee,” he said.
Other medical centers
Hilton Head and Coastal Carolina hospitals began to vaccinate staff on Wednesday after receiving a shipment of Pfizer doses.
Daisy Burroughs, a spokesperson for Tenet Healthcare, which owns the two hospitals, didn’t immediately know how many doses were on site Wednesday or how many employees were vaccinated.
She later wrote in a statement Thursday the company wouldn’t provide those numbers to reporters, but didn’t explain why.
Several large S.C. hospitals and health care systems had received vaccines as early as Dec. 14. The Medical University of South Carolina, Prisma Health and Lexington Medical Center all began to inoculate staff last Tuesday.
Local residents still have to follow various COVID-19 health recommendations for the foreseeable future, like wearing a face mask when in public, especially as cases surge around the state, experts say.
