A 25-year-old New Jersey man is in critical condition after a lab lost the test that proved he was positive for coronavirus, in turn, delaying his treatment.
According to PIX 11 News, Jack Allard fell ill on March 13, after running a fever for a few days while working in Manhattan.
“He had incredibly high fever, back pain, and he was throwing up,” Genny Allard, Jack’s mother, said of her son’s condition. “We thought he had a kidney infection.”
As his health continued to deteriorate, Jack was placed on a ventilator in the ICU and subsequently tested for the coronavirus. However, somehow, Jack’s results were misplaced, delaying his access to potentially life-saving experimental drugs.
Five days later, Jack was diagnosed with coronavirus and airlifted to the University of Pennsylvania for the clinical trial. Now, his mother is looking to warn the general public that “this happens to really healthy young people,” Genny said.
“He doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t have pre-existing conditions, he was a two-time, All American lacrosse player at Bates College. I don’t think he missed a day of work in a year at Bank of America,” she said.
Jack is reportedly one of more than 500 people on a waiting list for the University of Penn’s clinical trial, which uses the antiviral drug remdesivir, a treatment studied for Ebola patients in 2014.
“We have been assured he is the highest priority to receive the drug. He is the youngest and otherwise healthiest COVID-19 patient who can benefit from it,” Genny said on Tuesday, later revealing, “Jack made some incremental improvements.”
“Like a centimeter forward, but I’ll take it,” she said as she revealed her son is on an “extracorporeal membrane oxygenation” machine, which “was explained to me as a kind of dialysis for your lungs.”
