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Romania reported its highest daily amount of COVID-19 case numbers since the pandemic started Tuesday, with 11,049 news cases and 1,220 out of 1,239 intensive care unit (ICU) beds occupied, the Associated Press reported.
Some mobile ICUs are completely full, and in most cases, only deaths freed up spaces for new patients to receive care.
Genoveva Cadar, ICU chief doctor at Bucharest's Marius Nasta Institute of Pneumology, said beds are at 100 percent capacity and around 98 percent of the coronavirus patients are unvaccinated.
"In comparison to previous waves, people are arriving with more severe forms [of the disease]," Cadar said. "Very quickly they end up intubated—and the prognosis is extremely bleak."
Romanian government data shows that 91.5 percent of COVID-19 deaths in Romania from September 18 to 23 were unvaccinated patients.
"I don't know how we're going to get over the next period, but we're definitely going to be here," hospital manager Beatrice Mahler said. "We're going to do everything we can [but] we don't have a winning recipe."
COVID-19 cases continue to rise daily in Romania, as the number of citizens getting vaccinated is decreasing.
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.
In a packed ICU for coronavirus patients in Bucharest, 55-year-old Adrian Pica sits on his bed receiving supplementary oxygen to help him breathe. "I didn't want to get vaccinated because I was afraid," he said.
Around 72 percent of adults in the 27-nation European Union have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, but a stubbornly low uptake of the shots in some eastern EU nations now risks overwhelming hospitals amid a surge of infections due to the more contagious Delta variant.
"Until now, I didn't believe in COVID-19," Pica, who said his early symptoms left him sweating and feeling suffocated, told AP. "I thought it was just like the flu. But now I'm sick and hospitalized. I want to get a vaccine."
Bulgaria and Romania are lagging dramatically behind as the EU's two least-vaccinated nations, with just 22 percent and 33 percent of their adult populations fully inoculated. Rapidly increasing new infections have forced authorities to tighten virus restrictions in the two countries, while other EU nations such as France, Spain, Denmark and Portugal have all exceeded 80 percent vaccine coverage and eased restrictions.
Stella Kyriakides, the EU's health commissioner, said the "worrying gap" on vaccinations needs urgently addressing. Slovakia, Croatia and Latvia have vaccinated around 50 percent of all their adults. But jab uptake in many Central and Eastern European countries has remained weak or declined.
In Norway, where about 70 percent of the population has been vaccinated, authorities on Saturday scrapped restrictions that Prime Minister Erna Holberg called "the strictest measures in peacetime."
Nordic neighbor Denmark lifted virus restrictions on September 10, while the U.K. has also abandoned most pandemic restrictions due to high vaccine rates.
Vlad Mixich, a Romanian public health specialist, told AP that a "historic distrust of authorities" together with what he said was a very weak government vaccination campaign has contributed to the low vaccine uptake among his compatriots.
"During the vaccination campaign, unfortunately the politicians were the main communicators," he said, adding that a frequent turnover in the country's health ministers has had a massive impact on efforts to inoculate Romanians.
In neighboring Bulgaria, an alarming 23 percent of people said they do not want to get vaccinated, compared with only 9 percent across the bloc, according to a Eurobarometer survey.
Sabila Marinova, the ICU manager at a hospital in Bulgaria's northern town of Veliko Tarnovo, said none of its COVID-19 patients are vaccinated.
"We are very exhausted," she said. "It seems that this horror has no end."
The vice president of Romania's national vaccination committee, Andrei Baciu, said that fake news has been a key factor in keeping people from getting jabbed.
"There is and was a culture that promotes fake news. We are working with a team of specialists to combat [it]...right now there is a high number of [infections] due to low vaccination rates," he said, adding that the government is looking to increase ICU capacity.
Sometimes medical workers in Eastern Europe face additional risks. In September in Bulgaria's port city of Varna, a group opposed to vaccines attacked a medical team at a mobile vaccination station. Health Minister Stoycho Katsarov condemned the attack, saying "we will not allow our medics to be insulted, publicly harassed and humiliated" for trying to save lives.
The implementation of vaccine passports, which allow people to show their vaccine status to carry out day-to-day activities, may be one of few options left for European governments at a loss on how to encourage their vaccine-hesitant citizens to get jabbed.
Experts say vaccine skeptics in parts of Europe could hamper the entire continent's efforts to end the pandemic.
Back at the Marius Nasta Institute, Nicoleta Birtea, a 63-year-old unvaccinated COVID-19 patient who had previous health issues, said she woke up a month ago feeling dizzy and ill and called for an ambulance.
"I hope that I got here on time," she said.
