CLEVELAND — As the world endures yet another surge in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations, health care workers are mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted.

“They say, 'OK, I wanna breathe now. I’m ready for the vaccination," and there’s nothing you can say. But it’s too late. It’s too late," said Latrice Tolliver, a registered nurse at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland.

This scene has played out far too many times. Coronavirus patients often decide they to be vaccinated just before they're admitted to the ICU.

“It breaks my heart. I ask my patients flat out, 'why didn’t you get vaccinated? What’s going on?' And I don’t push it upon nobody, but I just wanna know because I wanna know their understanding of it, and most of the time, it’s about what they hear. It’s not about facts; it’s about what they hear," Tolliver said. 

Tolliver has been a nurse for 24 years. She said she has lost patients over the course of her career. But for her, losing a patient to coronavirus feels more difficult because often it happens so quickly.

“I took it personal because I’m asking myself, 'what else could we have done differently?' And at the end of the day, there’s nothing else that we could have done. I’m urging people that I talk to please do what you can. If you don’t want to do the vaccination or if you refuse to do it, OK, make sure you wear your mask. Make sure you’re doing your social distancing doing all that you can to confine yourself to where you’re not opening other people up to this COVID. Because this is running rampant right now. We have no control over it, but we can control some of the things that we’re doing, some of our actions," she said.

Tolliver said her advice is that right now, we can't just think about ourselves. She's asking for people to please think about everybody else.