On March 10, Natasha Ott, 39, felt the beginnings of a cold coming on.
She had a slight fever. CrescentCare, the medical clinic where she worked, had only a handful of tests for the new strain of coronavirus on hand. She initially passed on the chance to take one, after being told she was low-risk for the serious disease.
When her symptoms didn't shake, she did take the test on Monday. By Thursday, she felt "something in her lungs," she told longtime partner Josh Anderson. But she still felt well enough by then to join Anderson as the pair walked her dog.
On Friday, Anderson found Ott dead in her kitchen.
Her test results have still not come back. The Orleans Parish Coroner's Office has not released a cause of death; state health officials have not said whether they believe it was a case of coronavirus.
Anderson, 40, believes that's exactly what it was. What happened to his girlfriend, he said, should be a wake-up call for anyone who still believes COVID-19 isn't as deadly as experts have claimed.
Speaking in an interview Saturday, after his social media post recounting Ott's experience was shared hundreds of times, he said the dearth of tests shows how ill-equipped New Orleans is to handle a pandemic that has already claimed 16 lives and infected nearly 600 people across the state.
"She could have gotten a test last Friday, but they only had five tests, and she didn’t want to use one of them," Anderson said.
Less than a week ago, he was one of those who believed younger, relatively healthy people like Ott and himself would be fine amid the outbreak.
"I believed that people should stay home, but I don’t think I fully understood what the consequences could be if they didn’t," he said.
Noel Twilbeck, the CEO of CrescentCare, confirmed on Saturday that Ott was a former employee and that she had died, but he declined to say anything more, citing respect for her family.
Ott tested negative for the flu before being swabbed for COVID-19, Anderson said. Her symptoms — respiratory cold, fever and loss of appetite — persisted as she tried to take care of herself while waiting for the swab results, up until she died.
New Orleans health care professionals have complained about similar long turnarounds for results as well as the paltry number of test kits provided to the state by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The situation forced them to turn away sick people who didn’t qualify for what until recently was a fairly high bar for a test. At first, only recent travelers with fever and respiratory trouble that required hospitalization could be swabbed, although the government has since allowed doctors to use more of their own discretion.
But private testing has finally started to ramp up, and with that should come far more tests and shorter wait times for test results. “What we are really hoping for is to have a much faster turnaround than what we have seen so far,” Dr. Robert Hart, Ochsner’s chief medical officer, said Wednesday.
Again, if the Trump regime had chosen to ramp up testing six weeks ago, Natasha Ott would probably be alive. Maybe COVID-19 wasn't the cause of death, but the clinic she went to was overwhelmed and couldn't get the treatment she needed in the middle of a pandemic.
People are still going to die of seasonal flu, strokes, trauma, accidents, heart failure in the age of COVID-19. But because we have to spend so many resources on it, because this administration was more worried about politics than people?
Those people would be far more likely to survive. Medical resources, personnel, bed space, these are all limited things. COVID-19 cases overwhelming your local hospital means non-COVID-19 problems may not get treated either.
And people will die from that, too. It's a cascade effect.
But you can trace the source all the way to the Oval Office.
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