Six years Later: Lee Health CEO reflects on COVID-19's lasting impact

CAPE CORAL, Fla. (WINK)—Six years ago, the doors to Cape Coral Hospital's ICU didn't just open—they separated life from death.

Inside Lee Health's hospitals, COVID-19 changed everything. WINK News anchor Emma Heaton sat down with Dr. Larry Antonucci, Lee Health's president and CEO, who has led the system since 2017, to look back at those unprecedented times.

"I remember when I got the first call that we had the very first patient here, and I knew it was going to be a different world because we were dealing with a virus and a disease that we just didn't know how to handle," Antonucci said.

Doctors and nurses at Lee Health did what they could to save lives. But many of their first patients died.

"That visual of just going room to room and seeing everyone on their stomach, intubated, and especially younger people, that's the thing that really blew us away," Antonucci said. "30-40-year-olds who were literally dying of COVID. It was sober, absolutely."

WINK News spoke with Antonucci in August 2021. At the time, Lee County's vaccination rate was three times worse than the national average, and 96% of Lee Health's COVID ICU patients were unvaccinated.

As the virus raged, doctors and nurses faced a harsh reality. "When you start your day, and you have 40 patients on your service, and you spend the first hour talking to four patients for 15 minutes each trying to get them to take the vaccine, and you're unsuccessful, they're all feeling it," Antonucci said in August 2021.

Asked to think back to those moments, Antonucci recalled a different picture. "There was some resistance, but my recollection was there was a clamoring for the vaccine before it was available," he said. "I got calls every day. When are we going to be able to get the vaccine? When are we going to have it? And then when we had it, there was a tremendous backlog of people who wanted it. There were a handful that just didn't get it."

The biggest lesson from those unprecedented times, Antonucci said, was humility. "For me, it was humility and recognizing that you can come to one of our facilities with almost anything, whether it's a heart attack or a gunshot wound, and we know exactly what to do and how to do it, and to have to deal with a disease that we literally did not know how to treat was very humbling, and I think that was a valuable lesson for all of us," he said.

On the six-year mark, he asks all of us to keep that lesson in mind. "I think that we all have to appreciate the fragility of life, frankly, that any given day, anything can happen to us, and whether it's a global pandemic or an accident or a medical issue, remember that and just live every day," Antonucci said.

Antonucci also spoke about the people in health care and their deep commitment to their work. 

During COVID, some workers slept in their garages, afraid to go inside their homes. Some didn't hug their children because so much about the virus was still unknown. 

But they showed up every day despite the dangers.