An IL woman tested negative for COVID-19 but her doctor is convinced she had the virus. Here’s what went wrong
ALTON, Ill. (KMOV.com) — An Alton woman said her COVID-19 test came back negative, but said she and her doctor are confident she had the novel coronavirus. She blames the negative results on the delay in the Madison County Health Department getting her tested.
Nancy Hultz said she started getting symptoms on March 18.
“I got a major headache on the right side of my head that was different than any headache I had and I had that dry cough. I thought ‘do I have mono, do I have a sinus infection, what is going on here,'” said Hultz.
Hultz said she was also extremely fatigued and was having difficulty breathing. She decided to call her doctor.
“She said, ‘no sweetie, you don’t have any of that other stuff, you have the coronavirus,'” said Hultz. “She gave me the health department’s phone number. She said ‘you call them, you report it, and you see what they want to do about sending you for testing.’”
Hultz said it took a week before she got a call back from the health department. By the time she was sent for testing, Hultz said she was in her fourth week of symptoms.
Her test came back negative, though Hultz believes it’s because the virus was already out of her system.
“I asked the health department why it took so long for me to get tested and they said ‘because we don’t have enough tests.’ They said ‘we are only testing the people who actually go to the hospital and check themselves in,'” said Hultz.
As of Saturday, the Illinois Department of Public Health reported 299,896 COVID-19 tests had been performed. Of those, 58,529 were confirmed positive. Still, Illinois lags behind other states in testing.
“If we have thousands of people at home with this that we don’t even know about then how can we keep track of it?” said Hultz.
Dr. Alex Garza with the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force called the lack of testing a ‘supply chain issue.’
“It does impact our ability to decrease transmission because we’re missing some of those cases that we might have gotten if we had more supplies to do testing,” said Garza.
Hultz is hoping to do the antibody test to confirm whether she had it so she can help someone else fighting the virus. The CDC says the antibody tests are slowly becoming available through healthcare providers.
News 4 reached out to the Madison County Health Department and is waiting to hear back.
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