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.
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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.
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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.
As of Saturday, Louisiana was reporting nearly 600 confirmed cases of COVID-19, one of the highest numbers in the country. Sixteen people had …
"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 an 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.
A negative flu test, coupled with other COVID-19-like symptoms that can’t otherwise be explained, should ideally prompt a test or a CT scan that can shine light on the situation, other doctors have said.
New Orleans will open two drive-thru testing sites on Sunday to anyone with symptoms, thanks to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services pilot program, officials said Saturday. Those sites opened for the first time on Friday, but only to front-line workers who were symptomatic. Jefferson Parish on Saturday opened a third site to all comers with symptoms.
Crews at the Jefferson Parish site will perform 250 tests a day, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., officials said, and the New Orleans sites will do the same number. People should expect their results via a phone call within three to five days.
That rapid result eluded Ott.
Other than giardia, an intestinal infection she contracted while working in Togo for the Peace Corps, Ott was “in decent health,” a relative, Emily Coalson Stamets, wrote in a public social media post.
Stamets called Ott “one of the smartest people I know.”
Retired nurse Christiane Geisler, who worked with Ott, a social worker, at CrescentCare, said in an interview that she “never said 'no' to a client in need.”
Ott texted Anderson regularly in the days before her death, he said. She complained of feeling unwell and feverish; she drank "medicinal whiskey" to try to feel better. Things seemed to be getting better on Thursday; after walking her dog, Zola, she and Anderson made plans to watch Netflix on Friday night.
When she didn’t answer his calls that day, he went to her home, where he found her body on the floor.
If a loved one is showing symptoms, "you need to check with that person … not every day, but every hour,” Anderson said. “And at any point, if they say anything about their lungs, you need to get them to the hospital.”
Funeral arrangements are incomplete.
Staff writer Ramon Antonio Vargas contributed to this story.
