She Almost Died From Symptoms That Screamed Coronavirus, But Her Tests Were Negative

Vanessa Sherd started to feel a little sick about a week after she got home from a trip to Australia in February, with a layover in Seoul. Her symptoms were mild: a runny nose, a dry cough.

“I didn’t feel terrible, but I didn’t feel great,” she said.

As we now know, the novel coronavirus isn’t always easy to spot in a lineup.

In Sherd’s case, she would end up suffering symptoms that seemed to exactly match COVID-19, despite several test results that would later say she didn’t have it. Her story highlights growing concerns that current tests for the virus aren’t completely reliable yet.

Experts say that in the majority of cases, and especially in its early stages, the virus’ symptoms mirror a common cold or the beginnings of the flu. Up to 80% of known cases cause only mild to moderate illness, according to data gathered in China by the World Health Organization.

"This mild infection starts normally with a fever,” said Maria Van Kerkhove with the WHO Health Emergencies Program. “You have some aches and pains. You'll have a dry cough."

Sherd is Australian by birth, but has lived with her husband and daughter for five years in a quiet waterfront community in Novato.

A week after she came home from her trip, she awoke to the strange sound of her own breathing.

“I can't actually replicate the sound,” Sherd said. “If you can kind of imagine getting cellophane paper and crushing it up and then releasing it, and it makes a sound like, ‘snap, crackle and pop.’ ”

Her husband, Simon Yudelevich, asked if he should take her to the hospital.

“And I say, ‘No, I'm not that sick. I just sound strange. I'll be fine,’ ” she said.

The rest of her story may sound familiarly chilling: Her condition rapidly deteriorated and she almost died.

After checking in at the Kaiser Permanente San Rafael Medical Center a few days after she started feeling sick, Sherd remembered waiting in an isolation room for her doctor to see her.

“All of a sudden, it was like someone had come up behind me, put a plastic bag over my head, and I could not breathe,” she said.

Sherd has no memory of the next four days. She said that during that time she developed pneumonia in both lungs and multiple organ failures.

“I was literally drowning in my own lungs,” she said. “They really did not expect me to come through.”

When she finally woke up, Sherd said her doctors told her they hadn’t seen a patient in her condition recover so quickly.

“I had ICU nurses coming in their suits, giving me high-fives and touching me, saying, you’re the good luck story,” Sherd said.

Sherd’s doctors declined to speak with KQED due to Kaiser’s privacy policy. But Sherd said they told her she had all the symptoms of a serious case of COVID-19: dry cough, high fever, pneumonia in both her lungs.

Yet Sherd tested negative for the virus not once but three times. She said this baffled her doctors, who treated her the way they would any COVID-19 patient.

“They told me to come back in a few months to get a fourth test, to see if any antibodies to the virus show up in my blood,” she said.

In a recent op-ed published in the New York Times, Harlan Krumholz, a professor of medicine at Yale and a hospital director, referenced a study based in China that suggested that the rate of false negatives in current COVID-19 tests might be as high as 30%.

“False-negative test results — tests that indicate you are not infected, when you are — seem to be uncomfortably common,” he wrote.

In an interview, Dr. Krumholz said there are many reasons for a test result to be falsely negative. A swab to the back of the nose could miss the correct place or there could be incorrect interpretation of the results.

Krumholz said much remains unknown about testing for COVID-19.

“This is a new test essentially for a new condition,” he said. “And even though it was very similar to what we do for the flu, there are a lot of reasons that in the real world, the tests might not perform as well as they do under ideal conditions.”

Perhaps the most notable known example of a false negative is the case of Li Wenliang, a surgeon in Wuhan, China, who died of the virus, although he tested negative several times for the disease.

When asked if he thought it was possible that Sherd had COVID-19 despite her three negative tests, Krumholz said it was very possible.

“We don't know for sure, but we do know that there are a fair number of people ... who seem almost certainly to have it, but their tests are coming back negative,” Krumholz said.

Krumholz encouraged people with COVID-19 symptoms to assume that they are infected with the virus and to quarantine accordingly.

“Just because a coronavirus test says you don’t have the virus doesn’t mean you aren’t infected — or infectious,” he wrote in his op-ed.

Last week Sherd was able to return home. So far, her 16-year-old daughter and husband have both tested negative for the coronavirus.

Although Sherd’s story is unusual, her main message is one we’ve heard a lot lately: “Please, for goodness sake, take this seriously. It can take your life way faster than you could ever imagine.”