Ten out of the 39 patients are in the ICU, and of those, seven are on ventilators.
An alarming number of pregnant women are ending up hospitalized with COVID-19. One hospital admitted 39 expectant moms just this month, and all of them were unvaccinated.
Of the 39 pregnant patients admitted to the University of Alabama hospital in Birmingham, 10 are in the ICU, and of those, seven are on ventilators.
The CDC now recommends pregnant women get vaccinated, but many remain hesitant, including Haley Richardson, who was six-months pregnant when she contracted COVID-19 in July.
The nurse wrote on Facebook that she decided not to get vaccinated, because she thought she was protecting "my sweet baby girl... in my own womb."
Richardson and her unborn baby both died last week.
“She wished she would have gotten vaccinated. I won’t say that she just came out and said it, but that is the feeling that I got from talking with her and having some hard conversations. She was not anti-vaccination. None of us were, but, she was only concerned about the baby,” her husband, Jordan, told Inside Edition.
Meanwhile, the number of kids stricken with COVID-19 is spiking across the nation. Cases in children have surged from 38,000 at the end of July to 180,000 last week.
Among them is 3-year-old Aurora Cannon, who struggled to breathe as she battled the virus in a heart-wrenching video shot by her mom, an Oklahoma nurse, who blamed her daughter’s illness on unvaccinated patients she cared for at work.
“Maybe if they would have received the vaccine, they could have stayed home — they didn’t have to get treatment in the hospital. And I wouldn’t have had that exposure and I wouldn’t have brought it home to my daughter. It's a lot of guilt and frustration and a lot of what ifs,” the mom said.
Aurora spent almost two weeks in the hospital. On Monday, there was relief and celebration as she was reunited with her family.
