The second laboratory test report of a resident of Hussainabad — who died on April 3 as coronavirus patient — from a known private laboratory turned out to be negative for the virus. It perhaps points to defective sample technique of technicians in the hospital or where they are collected.
His fatality marked the first death of coronavirus patient in Hyderabad. The 54-year-old patient was brought to the Liaquat University Hospital (LUH) emergency ward and then shifted to intensive care unit (ICU). Before being diagnosed with coronavirus, his sample was collected in the LUH’s general ICU by a woman doctor from the medicine department. Hospital sources said the man was paralysed and suffering from multiple ailments. He was shifted to the LUH from a private hospital where he had been under treatment of a neuro-physician for about one year after paralysis, they added. Where did the fault occur? Nobody is willing to give an official view about the two different reports — positive and negative — of the same patient. His family’s grievance was that they were denied a decent burial for their loved one by the administration and police. The hospital Medical Superintendent (MS) Dr Mazhar Kalhoro, according to sources, only mentioned that “Yes, there are two different reports of the patient whose sample was obtained by the same technician.” He said that doctors were indeed frightened of performing in the LUH isolation ward because everyone knew that they were “front-line soldiers in the ongoing battle against coronavirus”. He, however, did not explain reasons as to how two different reports were generated from two different laboratories if the same collection was not defective.