By Francis Ogwo
A health worker in Detroit has been reported dead after being denied coronavirus test four times by the hospital where she worked for 31 years.
63-year-old Deborah Gatewood, reports say, had spent half of her life working as a Phlebotomist at Beaumont Hospital in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
Having suspected symptoms of COVID-19, Gatewood went to Beaumont’s emergency room on March 18 and requested for a coronavirus test. She was denied the test and she went home.
Gatewood’s only daughter, Kaila Carothers, told Fox2 Detroit, “They said the sickness wasn’t severe enough and that they weren’t going to test her. They told her to just go home and rest.”
The next day, Gatewood requested the test again and was denied and told to take cough medicine. Her daughter disclosed that she requested the test a total of four times at Beaumont, but was turned down all of the four times.
Sadly, at the end of March, Gatewood’s daughter found her mother lying motionlessly in bed at home. She took her mother to another hospital, Sinai-Grace Hospital and finally got her mother tested for the coronavirus.
Reports say by then, Gatewood had developed bilateral pneumonia and was to be intubated. She subsequently suffered kidney failure and died on April 17, just two years away from her retirement.
Beaumont Hospital released a statement after Gatewood’s death about its admission protocol:
“As patients come to Beaumont for care during this pandemic, we are doing everything we can to evaluate, triage, and care for patients based on the information we know at the time. We grieve the loss of any patient to COVID-19 or any other illness.”
“The fact that she got infected by doing the job she did for 31 years and she couldn’t get taken care of by her own family, meaning Beaumont, it’s sad,” lamented Carrothers.
According to reports, Detroiters have died more of COVID-19 than of homicides in the past two years combined.
It was reported that Michigan hospitals have not given accurate reports of how many staff they have lost to COVID-19.
Free Press investigations made contacts to several Michigan hospitals, but they declined to give numbers on how many of their staff had died from COVID-19.
Confirmation was later made through unions such as the Michigan Nurses Association. This revealed that the coronavirus is responsible for the death of about 16 people who worked in hospitals and allied services in Michigan.
