Jen Seifert

Delta is the reason why we had to turn patients away. And patients died – lots of patients died. They were just so, so sick. And I think the reason Delta was so hard is because it could have been mitigated by vaccinations and most patients in the hospital for Delta were not vaccinated.

They were just so, so sick.

Jen Seifert, Director, Patient Care Support

The first go round, the community was all in – they really were supportive of health care in general. We’re going to do it together, we’re there with you, that kind of thing. And that really tapered off last summer. Then the Delta variant hit and there was zero community support. The public was sick of wearing mask and didn’t want to social distance. They wanted to go out for dinner and do all that good stuff that makes life worth living. I get it! But it landed so many people in the hospital and that’s just very, very difficult.

We learned to be adaptive and flexible, and really how to turn on a dime. COVID, for all of the awfulness that it was, has taught us that we can do things we didn’t think we could do. And we can do them pretty quickly if we really need to. And so it stretched us quite a bit. If there’s a silver lining, I think it’s that we’ve learned to stretch and have gotten a little more comfortable doing that.