Politicalization of COVID changed reaction to diagnosis

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Dr. Mangala Narasimhan, director of critical-care services for Northwell Health, said those who are dying of COVID-19 today are on average younger than those who died last winter or in spring 2020.

"They’re not old people," she said. "A lot of old people got vaccinated. It’s really people in their 40s and 50s. It’s heartbreaking because we see these families, and they have young kids. It’s very traumatic for the staff to watch because it doesn’t need to happen."

Dr. Frank Coletta, chief of critical care at Mount Sinai South Nassau hospital in Oceanside, said that before they died, some COVID-19 patients told doctors and nurses they regretted not getting inoculated.

Some family members said they tried in vain to persuade loved ones to get the shot, he said.

"They say to me, 'We did everything we could to try to get the person vaccinated, but they wouldn’t listen,' " he said.

Coletta recalled how a man died at the hospital after receiving conflicting advice from his children.

"The daughter was an anti-vaxxer, the son wanted the father vaccinated, and the father listened to the daughter and didn’t get vaccinated," he said. "And now the patient’s passed, and now there are strong emotional issues and friction between the siblings."

Andy Powell, the owner of Powell Funeral Home in Amityville, said about half his funerals in January were of people who died of COVID-19. Other funeral homes also have been especially busy, he said.

Powell said family members are more reluctant to talk about someone dying of COVID-19 than of other diseases.

"They try to skirt around the issue, not in a bad way," he said. "I think they think having COVID has become so politicized that it’s almost like wearing a scarlet letter in some instances … They don’t necessarily feel the need to advertise that their loved one had that. They just want to move on with the grieving process without all the outside noise that seems to come along with COVID."

He said the large number of COVID-19 funerals still can’t compare with April 2020, when more than 2,750 Long Islanders died of COVID-19, nearly four times the number who died last month. That was before vaccines were available.

Narasimhan recalled how during the earlier COVID-19 surges, "Families were grateful for our care and we had good rapport with our families."

Now, she said, some families don’t believe doctors when they insist that their loved one is sick with COVID-19, with some convinced that the COVID-19 surge is only "media hype."

"The families are angry," she said. "They’re definitely feeling like COVID is not a real thing, and how could my family member be dying from this, that this is somehow a failure of care in some way. There’s a lot of anger from the families to the caregivers, which is very hard for the team here who have been dealing with this now for two years."

Coletta said he, too, is angry — at those spreading the vaccine disinformation online and elsewhere that leads people to distrust vaccines and then potentially end up gravely ill or dead.

The biggest reason patients give for not getting vaccinated is concern about potential long-term effects, he said.