'Pandemic Is Not Over': Florida Republican Describes Harrowing COVID-19 Ordeal

James Ring, president of the Lakeland GOP, said he hadn't taken the time to get vaccinated yet.

A Florida Republican official has urged people to get vaccinated and wear masks after he got badly sick with COVID-19 last month and feared he “wasn’t going to make it out of the hospital alive.” James Ring, president of the Republican Party of Lakeland, Florida, said he had grown complacent about remembering to wear a mask and hadn’t gotten around to getting vaccinated yet. The former Lakeland Police sergeant and U.S. Army Reserve chief warrant officer, who was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan, described himself in a Facebook post as a healthy 39-year-old with no pre-existing conditions. Because of that, he said, he had “always haphazardly assumed it wouldn’t be that bad if I caught the virus.”