COLUMBUS, Miss. (WTVA) - The pandemic continues to impact the lives of many, but especially affects those in the medical profession.

The emergency room nurse manager at Baptist Memorial Hospital Golden Triangle, Sandy Holman, tells explains what it is like to be behind the hospital doors. 

“When it first started, everybody was like, ‘Oh, it’s just another flu. This is how it’s going to be,'" said Holman, "but as we learned more about the disease, learned more about the virus, we realized that this was not the same.”

Holman has worked at Baptist for 17 years but this pandemic has brought a new meaning to the medical profession for her.

“We want to fix everybody and sometimes we’re not able to," she said. "That’s hard because we are pouring our hearts into this to try to help every single individual that’s struggling from this and we haven’t been able to do that.”

On Tuesday alone, Mississippi saw 98 deaths from the virus. Two of those were in Lowndes County.

However, Holman has hope for her patients as health care workers at Baptist started giving out the first round of the vaccine to the public.

“We know that that’s the only way to battle this," she explained, "Give people that immunity so that if they do contract the virus then their body is already ready to start fighting that.”

Holman said at first, she and her coworkers were skeptical of the vaccines because of how fast companies produced it but they quickly changed their opinions.

“Once it got here, after we had lived the life of taking care of these patients and just being so exhausted and you know seeing so many patients that didn’t do well, we realized that hey this is what’s best for our patients. It’s what’s best for our community," said the health care worker.

Governor Tate Reeves announced on Tuesday that citizens 65 and older can now get the vaccine.

Holman hopes this wider range of vaccinated patients will decrease the number of people in their ICU department.

“We want to make sure that we have ICU bed and bed availability for things other than just COVID because we know life doesn’t stop," she said. "People continue to have wrecks. People continue to have heart attacks and people continue to need surgeries.”

Baptist was able to give around 220 vaccines to the public on Tuesday and will continue to administer the vaccines on Wednesday and Thursday.