With a fourth surge of COVID-19 patients pushing Mercy Health Muskegon past its capacity limits, the hospital’s Chief Medical Officer says he is fed up with those who refuse to get the shot.
“I’ll be bluntly honest with you, I am tired of hearing people say ‘I don’t trust the drug companies, I don’t trust the CDC,’ I really don’t care if you don’t trust them, the vaccines are proven to be effective, and it is absolutely true, that if we could push the vaccination numbers higher, we wouldn’t be in the health care crisis that we are in right now.”
That is Dr. Justin Grill the Chief Medical Officer at Mercy Health Muskegon. He says with hundreds of new cases of COVID-19 a day along the Lakeshore, it’s the worst the pandemic has ever been including during the lockdown, and the hospital is at 105 % capacity and at its breaking point.
With all 246 available beds filled right now at the hospital, currently over 70 are occupied by people suffering from the coronavirus, and nearly all of them, Dr. Grill says, are unvaccinated.
What that has done, is limit the number of beds for people who are there for other health concerns, create extremely long wait times in the ER, and with a shortage of health care workers as is, and Dr. Grill says it’s pushing his staff to physical and mental exhaustion each day.
“It is a true challenge right now to work in health care,” Grill said.
The simple fix to all of this, he says, is for the unvaccinated to get the shot. When asked, Dr. Grill said had no answers as to why won’t trust their doctor’s advice when it comes to the vaccine, but they will then turn around and trust the very same doctor with their lives once they test positive for COVID-19.