A healthy but unvaccinated 19-year-old died after spending two weeks in hospital with COVID-19, leaving her family devastated that they’d chosen not to get vaccinated, despite the threat of the Delta variant.
Breanna Gray, who was set to be a freshman at Navarro College this fall, had no underlying health conditions when she contracted COVID-19 and entered the hospital on July 31, according to FOX 4. The Texas teen stayed there for more than two weeks, before dying after being on supplemental oxygen. Nobody in her family was vaccinated, Breanna’s mother Tabatha Gray told FOX 4, and it’s a decision they all regret. The last words Tabatha ever spoke to her daughter were ones trying to calm her down over the phone as the 19-year-old’s condition worsened on August 19, and she died hours later.
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“You just hear her screaming through the mask for me, and that was the last time,” Tabatha Gray said. “And the last voice I heard is her yelling for me in her mask.”
The entire household was unvaccinated, and that led to all of them contracting the virus. However, only the teen fell seriously ill and ended up in the hospital.
Now, the entire family has gotten their first dose of a vaccine and has their second shot scheduled for later in September. The family that societal pressure from nearby friends and family influenced their decision to remain unvaccinated.
“I shouldn’t have let other people in my head or life get to me,” Gray told FOX 4. “I should’ve done what I needed to do to protect my family.”
Across the country, hospital beds are filling once again with COVID-19 patients—with nearly all of them being unvaccinated. In fact, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services put out a press release last week stating that unvaccinated individuals are 15.4 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than vaccinated individuals.
The surge is coming from the highly contagious Delta variant, and it’s making emergency rooms and ICUs busier than ever before. Not only are they busier, but doctors’ ability to predict who gets ill is diminishing. This means that younger people, like Gray, who are unvaccinated are at greater risk thanks to the Delta variant.
While the U.S. has an ample supply of COVID vaccines, only slightly more than half the population, about 52 percent, of the population is fully vaccinated, according to Our World in Data. Red states in particular, such as Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia, have significantly lower vaccination rates than their Democratic-voting counterparts.
