Just a day after the governor made his public request on April 22, the California Office of Emergency Services made calls to Southern California coroners, according to local officials.
Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he was requesting that coroners around the state reexamine deaths that back date back to December in an effort to hunt for previously undetected coronavirus cases.
Reports of California’s first death from the virus, in Santa Clara County on Feb. 6, turned out to be weeks earlier than officials previously had thought that people were succumbing to the illness. That prompted the governor’s request.
Whether local medical examiners actually will be able to test old cases, however, remains uncertain.
A day after the governor made his public request on April 22, the California Office of Emergency Services made calls to Southern California coroners, according to local officials.
Capt. Greg Myler runs the San Berardino County Sheriff’s coroner division, and got one of those calls. He said coroner’s employees researched what the Centers for Disease Control require to process samples for coronavirus tests — one of the requirements was submitting at least eight lung tissue specimens from a deceased person being tested.
“We only collect five,” Myler said.
Other requirements also could make testing old cases more complicated, Myler said. In its guidelines, the CDC said any sample stored in formalin — a solution mixing water with formaldehyde commonly used in medical examiner offices to store old tissue samples — for more than two weeks could produce a false negative.
