‘There will be no next year’
The chief operating officer of faculty physicians at UNC Hospitals was devastated to learn his brother’s lifelong friend, who refused to get vaccinated, died from COVID-19.
Dr. David Zvara, chair of the UNC School of Medicine’s anesthesiology department since 2008, is also chief operating officer for UNC Faculty Physicians. His story is part of The Well’s COVID Diaries, an occasional series exploring the physical, mental and emotional toll the pandemic has taken on members of the Carolina community.
Last April, my older brother, Peter, traveled from his home in Seattle to Toledo, Ohio, where we grew up, to meet some old friends for a turkey hunt. The night before the hunt, one of his closest buddies, I’ll call him Brad, phoned Peter.
“Hey, I can’t come,” Brad said. “I’m quarantined. I’ve got COVID. I can send the guide. You’ll still have a great hunt.”
“I didn’t fly all this way to hunt with a guide,” Peter said. “I came to hunt with you.”
“Well, then, next year,” said Brad.
I’m 10 years younger than Peter. I knew Brad for 55 years, since I was 5 years old. I don’t care how old you are; you always look up to your older brother and his friends. They were all athletes. They played high school baseball. They all wore their letter jackets. From my perspective, they lived a life that was amazing. It was always on the horizon of what was next for the little brother. Anything they did was mythical.
Older brother Peter (left) and David Zvara on a salmon fishing trip to Alaska. There will be no hunting trip next year for Peter’s lifelong friend. (courtesy of David Zvara)
We grew up in Sylvania, Ohio, 20 miles west of Toledo. Peter and I moved away, but Brad stayed in Toledo. We all grew up and established families. And then, old friends began to reconnect in their senior years. You drift apart, and then you reconnect. Peter and Brad became really close again, much like they were in high school.
That’s what led to last April’s turkey hunt. COVID vaccinations were making it possible to travel and get together again. But before the hunt, Peter and the others in the group learned that Brad wasn’t vaccinated. They were all, like, Well, what are you waiting for?
I’m just not sure that it’s safe, Brad told them. I’m not sure it’s effective. COVID’s not that big of a deal. It’s just the flu. It won’t happen to me.
Of course, all those things are untrue.
I’m the chair of the anesthesiology department at the School of Medicine, but I’m also the chief operating officer of faculty physicians at UNC Hospitals. I’ve been heavily involved in setting up the respiratory diagnostic center for COVID-19 testing and the COVID-19 vaccination center, as well as our hospital response to the community outbreak. I am more than just a casual bystander. I’ve been deeply involved in the pandemic response from day one.
My brother is not a physician, and he often reaches out to me. When Peter learned that Brad had COVID, he called me. I followed the journey the whole way by phone and text.
Peter called me when Brad went to the hospital. I was there on the phone when Brad was admitted to the intensive care unit. I was on the phone when the ICU doctors put Brad on a ventilator.
“How are things looking for Brad?” Peter asked.
“It looks bad,” I told him. “This is not a good course.”
Peter texted to tell me about Brad’s increasing oxygen demand, and I wrote back, “You need to be ready for bad news. He might recover, but it will be an uphill battle.”
On the morning of June 16, as I was preparing to send out the week’s pandemic projections to the UNC faculty physicians, I learned that Brad had died. The news hit me hard. I added a personal note to my report:
“Last night, sometime around 2 a.m., a lifelong friend of mine died from COVID-19. The last seven days of his life were on a ventilator. When challenged about a month ago on why he was not yet vaccinated, he gave the commonly cited reasons of hesitancy. Basically, he didn’t think it was a big deal and that the vaccination was, somehow, unnatural, unproven and unsafe. Now he’s dead. Sadly, his death was totally preventable and that is the real tragedy.”
“When the music stops, and the crowd leaves, the cold reality settles in,” Peter Zvara wrote in a text to his brother, David.
When COVID first washed over us as a country and as a community, all of us were vulnerable and we were all frightened and we did the best that we could with whatever information and treatments we had. But now, we’re in the age of the vaccine. Over 1 billion people in the world have received a COVID vaccine. We know the vaccines are safe. We know that they work. We know that if you get vaccinated your chances of becoming severely ill plummet.
The vaccine would have prevented Brad’s death, without a doubt.
My brother traveled back to Ohio for the funeral. He went to the wake and the burial. Before he flew home to Seattle, Peter went to the cemetery one last time by himself. He texted me a picture of the gravesite. It was a striking, impactful moment, seeing the grave with fresh, overturned dirt on the body of this friend who died unnecessarily.
“When the music stops, and the crowd leaves, the cold reality settles in,” my brother wrote in a text. And then he quoted the Bible, Psalms 22:14: “I am poured out like water, and my heart is melted like wax.”
I urge those who have not yet done so to get a COVID-19 vaccination.
