'I took my life for granted:' NC woman who ended up in ICU with COVID regrets not getting vaccine

FAIRMONT, N.C. (WTVD) -- A Robeson County woman who nearly died from COVID-19 now says she regrets not getting vaccinated.

Lashawna Watson Baker, 41, is home but she 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 got sick.

"It was a fight. And I needed my hometown. And every church and everybody praying for me," she told WPDE.

Lashawna spent 12 days in the hospital and many of those were in the ICU and on a ventilator.

"The doctors and the nurses I remember them telling me that I was going to go on a ventilator," she said. "And then they called my family and told them the same thing. After I got unconscious -- that I wasn't going to make it until the next morning."

However, she pulled through and went 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 should've never did that. I should've been vaccinated," Lashawna said.

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

"People that are getting, I think, a little more worried. Because they know a lot of younger people who are being hospitalized. And are having more complications with the COVID virus," said Tracy Jones, Communicable Disease supervisor for the Robeson County Health Department.