As of Tuesday, unvaccinated people made up more than 80 percent of COVID-19 patients in Iowa hospitals, and 83 percent of those in the ICU, according to the state health department. 

Weeks is unfortunately not the first non-COVID patient to die while being denied healthcare due to an overrun system. In August, 46-year-old U.S. Army veteran Daniel Wilkinson went to a hospital in Texas suffering from gallstone pancreatitis--a treatable illness--while doctors raced to find a hospital with the capacity to treat him. He was airlifted to a hospital in Houston, but it was too late, and he died. 

And in September, 73-year-old Alabaman Ray DeMonia suffered a cardiac event and died after being turned away from more than 40 ICUs that didn't have the capacity to treat him, his family said. 

"In honor of Ray, please get vaccinated if you have not, in an effort to free up resources for non COVID related emergencies," DeMonia's family wrote in his obituary. "Due to COVID 19, [Cullman Regional Medical Center] emergency staff contacted 43 hospitals in 3 states in search of a Cardiac ICU bed and finally located one in Meridian, Mississippi. He would not want any other family to go through what his did."

Since Weeks' death, the nation's hospitals have been hit by yet another setback in the fight against COVID--the highly transmissible Omicron variant. Though the Delta is still the dominant strain in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) region that includes Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri, the CDC says Omicron now makes up a quarter of all cases there. Experts expect that Omicron will soon overtake Delta in most places as it has in New York and Washington D.C.