“I took my life for granted:” an NC woman who ended up in intensive care with COVID regrets not having been vaccinated

FAIRMONT, NC (WTVD) – A Robeson County woman who nearly died from COVID-19 now says she regrets not being vaccinated.

Lashawna Watson Baker, 41, is at home but says she has to learn to walk again.

She is well known in the town of Fairmont, so the community rallied around her to pray when she fell ill.

“It was a struggle. And I needed my hometown. And every church and everyone was praying for me,” she told WPDE.

Lashawna spent 12 days in the hospital and many of them were in intensive care and on ventilators.

“The doctors and nurses that I remember told me I was going to go on a ventilator,” she said. “And then they called my family and told them the same thing. After I became unconscious – that I wasn’t going to get there until the next morning.”

However, she made it out and returned home earlier this week.

Now she says the near-death experience could have been avoided if she had been vaccinated.

“I took my life for granted. And I never should have done that. I should have been vaccinated,” Lashawna said.

Public health officials say vaccination rates have improved recently in Robeson County as the Delta variant increases.

“People who are getting, I think, a little more worried. Because they know a lot of young people who are hospitalized. And have more complications with the COVID virus,” said Tracy Jones, supervisor of communicable diseases for the health of the Robeson County. Department.