A New York woman who wasn’t tested for coronavirus until her third visit to the hospital is currently on life support due to the virus.
Schoolteacher Rana Zoe Mungin, 30, went to the doctor after she started feeling sick last week.
“My sister went to the hospital on the 15th of March for fever and shortness of breath. They gave her albuterol for asthma and and gave her a shot of Toradol for her headache,” Mia Mungin told PIX 11. Rana’s condition continued to deteriorate, and she was taken by ambulance to the hospital for a second visit with her family four days later.
They were told, “Her lungs are clear. We’re not going to test for corona, because we don’t have enough tests,” according to Mia. A day later, Rana returned by ambulance to the hospital for a third visit because “she wasn’t breathing.”
The family wasn’t allowed in, and three hours later a doctor told them Rana was “intubated and on a ventilator.”
Her distraught sister feels guilty about her sister’s condition. Mia is a nurse and may have been exposed to coronavirus while interviewing nurses who worked in hospitals fighting the pandemic. She might even know the moment it was transmitted to Rana.
On March 11, Mia accidentally coughed on her sister while they were having a conversation.
“She sat next to me,” Mia recalled to NBC New York. “She says, ‘How are you doing?’ And I was coughing, and then she said to me, ‘You coughed on me,’ and I’m just playing these words in my head like an echo, you know.”
By the weekend, Rana developed a fever and shortness of breath.
The family hopes Gilead, a pharmaceutical company, will release an experimental drug called Remdesivir. They applied for a clinical trial on Rana’s behalf but were denied due to prioritization of pregnant women and children, according to The New York Daily News.
Mia lost one sister almost two decades ago to respiratory illness and she doesn’t want history to repeat itself.
“I had an older sister on my dad’s side and she died of asthma in the same hospital — not with COVID-19 — at 20 years old,” she said to NBC New York. “My father was saying it’s like déjà vu. Repeating itself again.”
On Thursday, Mia tweeted her sister was being transferred to Mount Sinai Hospital.
