Coroner: New Orleans 39-year-old, once feared to be coronavirus victim, died of heart condition – NOLA.com

A 39-year-old New Orleans woman whose boyfriend blamed coronavirus for her untimely death, in a social media post that spread nationally in the fearful early days of the pandemics spread across the U.S., in fact died naturally of a weakened heart, a coroners official said Wednesday.

The cause of Natasha Otts death on March 20 is listed as dilated cardiomyopathy with remote myocardial infarct, Orleans Parish Coroner Dr. Dwight McKennas office said. A myocardial infarction is a heart attack.

Ott was found dead on her kitchen floor, but the positive coronavirus test that her boyfriend, Josh Anderson, had forecast in a widely shared social media post never materialized.

The test she took before she died came back negative after her death, and a posthumous test confirmed that result, family members said.

Anderson had recounted that an ailing Ott, after testing negative for the flu, had been administered a test for COVID-19 the potentially deadly respiratory disease caused by the virus but died before the results came back.

Her death came less than two weeks after the first case of coronavirus turned up in the city, when doubts swirled over the risks of COVID-19 to the young and healthy, along with the elderly and infirm that it most brutally attacks.

It turns out that COVID-19 rarely strikes those in Ott's demographic -- although the young are not immune. In Louisiana, just 59 of nearly 3,000 deaths attributed to coronavirus have involved people younger than 40. More than two-thirds of those who have died were over 70.

But that wasn't known when Anderson posted his somber account of Ott's decline in her last days, from text messages he said he received from her before she died.

An autopsy for Ott was performed in late March, from which the results were released Wednesday.

A native of Claremont, California, Ott had been a social worker with the local nonprofit health clinic CrescentCare beginning in 2017. She also had been the projects and operations manager for the nonprofit Young Leadership Council for about a year beginning in 2016.

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Coroner: New Orleans 39-year-old, once feared to be coronavirus victim, died of heart condition - NOLA.com