Second coronavirus test was negative for New Orleans woman, 39, found dead in kitchen

A second coronavirus test came back with negative results for a 39-year-old woman who was found dead on her kitchen floor last week while she was still awaiting the results of an earlier test for the virus, the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office said Friday.

The exact reason the woman, Natasha Ott, died remains under investigation by the Coroner’s Office, spokesman Jason Melancon said. Such investigations can take several weeks to complete.

Ott’s death drew public notice when her boyfriend, Josh Anderson, wrote in a widely shared social media post that he had found her dead March 20 in her kitchen. Anderson recounted that an ailing Ott, after testing negative for the flu, had been tested for COVID-19 — the potentially deadly respiratory disease caused by the virus — but died before getting the results back.

Anderson said he had gotten text messages from Ott in the days before she died that described a series of persistent symptoms consistent with the virus.

But after her death, the first test result came back and showed that coronavirus “was not detected,” Ott’s sister, Emily Coalson Stamets, wrote Thursday on Facebook.

Stamets said the doctor who tested Ott “was incredulous” and immediately asked the commercial testing company LabCorp to retest Ott’s specimen. Stamets said the Coroner’s Office also sent in a specimen from Ott to be tested at a local university that Stamets did not identify.

Those results were in by Wednesday and again indicated that no coronavirus was detected, Stamets said.

An autopsy for Ott was set to be performed Thursday. The Coroner’s Office didn’t comment on the results Friday.

Stamets’ post Thursday said Ott had complained of fever, muscle aches, fatigue, and feeling like “something was in (her) lungs,” in the days before her death. Such symptoms are associated with COVID-19, which is disproportionately lethal to the elderly but has killed people of almost all age groups.

“She had no pre-existing conditions that would have caused these symptoms or sudden death,” Stamets wrote.

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