UC Davis research report: Protocols delayed testing of Solano woman for coronavirus
In a research paper published Monday, the medical team at the University of California, Davis shared further details on the Solano County woman who recovered from the nation’s first community-transmitted case of COVID-19.
The patient, who is in her 40s, has never been identified by name. She had gone to NorthBay VacaValley Hospital in Vacaville after three days of flu-like symptoms, UC Davis researchers said, and upon her fifth day at that hospital, doctors there transferred her to UC Davis Medical Center for life support consideration.
UCD doctors were told that the patient had not traveled to any high-risk countries or been in contact with individuals diagnosed with the new coronavirus, also known as SARS-CoV2. Consequently, UCD researchers said, she did not meet guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to merit testing.
Given this, doctors at UC Davis Health looked for a potential bacterial cause for the patient’s mysterious respiratory illness, according to the UCD paper published in the Clinical Infectious Diseases medical journal, but after 48-72 hours of testing, physicians still were not able to identify a source for the infection.
After further interviews with the family, they learned that the patient worked at a high-traffic commercial business in a county where another facility “had been housing repatriated individuals with SARS CoV2 infection.”
The paper did not identify either facility. Solano County’s Travis Air Force Base had been used to house Americans repatriated from Wuhan, China, and later from cruise ships.
“This raised the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 could be acquired through community spread of the disease,” the UCD researchers stated in the paper. “Our speculation was supported by the concurrent publication of a locally transmitted COVID-19 case, reported from Taiwan. For these reasons our patient was reviewed again and at that time COVID-19 testing was recommended by the CDC and the patient was placed under strict airborne and contact precautions.”
That testing showed that the patient did indeed have COVID-19, and as The Bee has reported, UCD researchers started the patient on an antiviral drug that was developed to use against Ebola but has shown some promise against the new coronavrus: Gilead’s Remdesivir.
The patient arrived at UCD Medical Center on a ventilator, and despite acute renal failure, she never required dialysis or more complex life support, researchers said. Doctors successfully removed the ventilation tube 14 days after her mid-February transfer to the Sacramento-based hospital, the paper noted, and a UCD spokesperson said she had returned home the week of March 15.
This story was originally published April 3, 2020 at 10:48 AM.
