Robert Gehrke: How do you tell the families of the unvaccinated their loved one has died?

When the doctor entered the room, the patient was unconscious, as she had been for days. She had been in the hospital for nearly three weeks at that point, and a tube in her throat was pumping oxygen into her nearly defeated lungs.

Her husband, himself just out of the hospital, sat in a chair next to her bedside, his head laying in her lap. When Dr. Nate Hatton came in, the husband looked up, tears streaming down his face, sobbing. Before there were even introductions, Hatton told me, the man said, “We shoulda got vaccinated. I think she’s going to die.”

He sat vigil at her bedside, helpless and crying, until she slipped away.

“He was very aware of the severity of the decision they had made,” Hatton said of the couple from the Uinta Basin, which has Utah’s lowest vaccination rate. “It just breaks your heart to see that. It’s really hard and sometimes you get really angry and sometimes you get really sad, because it’s just so preventable.”

Hatton is the assistant chief of pulmonary medicine at University Hospital, where 35 patients have died from COVID-19 since April. Not a single one of them — zero of 35 — had been fully vaccinated.

Statewide, since mid-January when the first Utahns became fully vaccinated, those who were unvaccinated account for 98.5% of all deaths and about 95% of all hospitalizations.

“The data behind the vaccine is almost unbelievably good from a statistical perspective in how safe it is and how effective it is,” Hatton said.

Yet Hatton and his team still have to be put in the unimaginably frustrating position of telling 35 families their loved ones have died.

“I had a 38-year-old guy die on me the other day,” Hatton said, “and I had to talk to his 16-year-old daughter, his 36-year-old wife and his parents.

The patient had heard somewhere that the vaccine caused infertility, so he skipped it. Now his daughter doesn’t have a dad.

Another woman, who was 46 and spent nearly a month unable to see her husband or kids, told Hatton her husband’s friend got the vaccine and developed sepsis in his metal joints. The woman didn’t want the same thing to happen in the fillings in her teeth. She is lucky to be alive.

Just a few months ago, cases were low, vaccinations were rising and it seemed we were emerging from the darkest days of the pandemic. There was hope, especially those doctors and nurses who had borne such a horrific burden. Now that hope has been snatched away, and these health care workers are again bracing for the worst.

“Our workforce is struggling,” Hatton said. “When you walk into the ICU and you talk about COVID, people will literally start crying.”

I have stopped searching obituaries for the latest COVID deaths — even though most no longer mention it — because I don’t like where it takes me.

I try to find sympathy for these people and their families, but its hard to squeeze out even a drop when for months now they have had at their disposal one of the greatest scientific miracles of our lifetime — “a literal Godsend,” as LDS Church President Russell Nelson called it — and they flatly rejected it.

Then it’s just anger that takes over. Anger at the selfishness; anger at the prospect of going back to the awful masks to try to protect people who, when the virus was raging in Utah in December and January, couldn’t be bothered to do the same; and anger at the people who just keep spreading lies and misinformation, ignorant or indifferent to the consequences.

Give me liberty or give me death? Now you can have both.

And there’s a sense of helplessness. What can we possibly do to slow this spread?

We aren’t going to see any widespread preventive measures like mask requirements or mandated distancing — the Republican Legislature has made sure of that. They’ve also prevented school districts from requiring masks when children head back to school in a few weeks — even though children under 12 are unvaccinated as are 2/3 of those age 12-18.

The Tribune editorial board called for a statewide vaccine mandate in order to be in public places — something that I think is a political pipe dream and would probably only result in fueling vaccine opposition.

So what can be done?

I’d still like to see more businesses offering incentives to get vaccinated. One Utah bank is paying employees $250 to get the shot, which sounds like a lot, but not if it keeps employees alive and on the job. Other businesses could follow the lead of The Bayou, which is only open to those who can prove they’ve been vaccinated.

I’d still like to see the LDS Church take a more active role in advocating vaccinations and facilitating administration of the shots.

Hospitals and nursing homes should make the shots mandatory for those who come into contact with patients. Outbreaks in nursing homes are rising and residents of those facilities are roughly 30 times more likely to die.

Colleges and universities, on the brink of having scores of thousands of students returning to school, roughly half of whom are unvaccinated, are prohibited from mandating vaccines, but they could hike tuition to account for the necessary costs of quarantines and testing, then deduct the charge for those who have a vaccination card.

Given that even the average cost of a Covid hospital stay runs about $25,000, insurers and employers could charge a premium rate to cover the unvaccinated (or else the rest of us end up paying for their preventable care).

Unfortunately, most of this won’t happen and, even if it did, it is just nibbling at the edges of a conundrum I’m increasingly convinced we can’t crack.

A recent poll by The Associated Press found that, of those Americans who have not been vaccinated, 35% said they probably would not get the shots, 45% said they definitely will not.

Lacking political will or personal responsibility, we’re doomed, it seems, to ride out this latest wave. It will take a particular toll on two groups: Those, like the Uinta Basin couple, who have refused to protect themselves, and those already-traumatized, exhausted doctors and nurses who will be called on again to care for the sick and explain to grieving family members that their loved ones have died an unnecessary death.