California Detective Dies from COVID-19 After Doctors Refuse to Test Her

After doctors refused twice to test her for the coronavirus, a California detective passed away.

43-year-old Santa Rosa Det. Marylou Armer finally got tested on March 23rd. The test came back positive. However, “it was too late already,” said her sister Mari Lau.

According to Lau, a doctor at Kaiser Permanente’s Vallejo Medical Center told her sister that her age and lack of underlying medical conditions deemed her she not vulnerable to the disease.

When her husband brought her to the hospital, she finally got the test. Fox News reported that in the emergency room, medical professionals “quickly sedated and intubated” her “in an effort to boost the dangerously low levels of oxygen in her bloodstream.”

The hospital placed Armer a medically induced coma after the test came back as positive. Unfortunately, she never woke up and died on March 31st.

On April 3, police officers from across Northern California lined up their vehicles to honor Marylou Armer, a police detective who is the first known law enforcement officer in the state to die of COVID-19.

Read more about the lives lost to coronavirus: https://t.co/6ldU4KbQvV pic.twitter.com/e1yKuC8cr4

— TIME (@TIME) April 15, 2020

Tested Too Late

Armer’s husband requested for privacy for him and his daughter since his wife’s death. The family agreed to let Lau share details about Armer.

Talking about her sister’s ineligibility for the test, Lau said: “It is very frustrating. A person knows their body and knows when something is wrong.”

Press Democrat reported that Kaiser confirmed in a statement that Armer did not immediately receive a test.

According to Dr. David Witt, the HMO’s national infectious disease expert, she was in regular contact with her physician. Doctors adhered to “public health authority testing guidelines, which have been based on a very limited availability of tests.”

“We offer heartfelt sympathies to Detective Armer’s family and loved ones at this profoundly difficult time,” Witt said in the statement.

Press Democrat reported that when Armer first felt sick, she told her sister that she was sick with a cold or the flu. “She had a fever, body aches, shortness of breath and some chills. A few days later, her fever and body aches subsided a little, but she still had some trouble breathing,” said the report.

“She said she’d never felt this kind of sickness in her body before,” Lau said.

Armer was the first California peace officer to die from COVID-19. She is also one of nine Santa Rosa police officers and staff to test positive for COVID-19 as of Friday.

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