PEORIA, Ill. — Doctors are sounding the alarm that people need to get vaccinated, or they risk having to go to the hospital.
In between July and August, OSF St. Francis has seen a quadrupling of inpatients suffering from COVID-19. Vice President of Community Medicine Dr. Mark Meeker says that number involves people who are on ventilators and in the intensive care unit.
"95 plus percent of the hospitalized patients at St. Francis right now are unvaccinated," Meeker said Tuesday, August 17th. "100 percent of the ICU patients that we have right now are unvaccinated."
Dr. Meeker says his team's seeing powerful evidence the vaccines are still working against the Delta variant. Wednesday, August 18th, 18 people were on ventilators at OSF due to COVID-19. None of them were fully vaccinated.