Justin Gilmore was hospitalized and treated for COVID-19. His care team was certain he had it — but he kept testing negative. MrJDWalsh reports on concerns over inconclusive test results
Justin Gilmore in a hospital bed after testing negative for COVID-19. Photo: Courtesy of Justin Gilmore In late April, Justin Gilmore started feeling a little sluggish. When he mentioned his fatigue to his wife, she pointed out that he hadn’t been eating much lately. Gilmore and his family had been vigilant about isolating themselves in their small Philadelphia row house since early March, weeks before Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf issued a stay-at-home order.
When Gilmore’s blood oxygen dipped below 90 a few days later, Petrone told him to go to the emergency room. Gilmore packed a bag and said good-bye to his family from a distance. “I thought I was going to die,” Gilmore said. “And I couldn’t even hug my wife and kids.” Gilmore’s experience, exhibiting all the symptoms of COVID-19 but never receiving a clear COVID-19 diagnosis, isn’t uncommon. As testing ramps up nationwide, so has concern over inconclusive test results. From Atlanta to El Paso, patients have been admitted to hospitals soon after testing negative for COVID-19. A 39-year-old COVID-19 patient near Los Angeles needed to be put on life support after testing negative even as he gasped for air in the emergency room.
“There are a lot of examples out there where, because things are moving so fast and we’re building the plane as we go, mistakes are being made,” said Schacker. “When you’re in the middle of a pandemic, sciences are what you’ve got to use to get through it. You’ve got to do the randomized clinical trials. You have to use diagnostics that are rigorously evaluated and rigorously monitored and maintained, not the commercial kits that are made overnight and have a 50-50 chance of working.
Experts generally agree that any variability in PCR results is most often attributed to human error, not the tests. “The confusion over the PCR tests has been because of sample collection,” Schacker said. “You get into some goofy stuff if you’re doing a nasopharyngeal swab and you don’t collect it correctly. There may not be virus there when the person might actually be infected or if you use the wrong kind of swab, you can screw up the result.
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