"I am furious with myself"

“The fact that I am here now, I am furious with myself,” she told CNN between deep, deliberate breaths. “Because I was not vaccinated.”

Matzen, 44, finds herself in the Covid-19 intensive care unit at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge. She is receiving oxygen treatments and hopes she stays well enough to avoid getting hooked up to a ventilator…

“This is absolutely disproportionately hitting folks that are unvaccinated,” Thomas said. “Those are the folks that in a very high majority we’re seeing coming to the hospital.”

Matzen told CNN she was not opposed to getting vaccinated — she just hadn’t gotten around to it. Every time she planned to get inoculated, “something would come up,” she said.

“I have this feeling … if I was vaccinated, I wouldn’t be hospitalized,” Matzen said.