The Connecticut Supreme Court is hearing a case of a woman who died of a heart attack while waiting on the results of a COVID-19 test in March 2020. The court will determine whether hospital immunity granted by the state applies to her death, The CT Mirror reported Feb. 12.
Cheryl Mills went to Norwich, Conn.-based Backus Hospital and complained of a sore throat and headache. She told physicians she also had a heart condition. They ran tests and determined she may be having a heart attack. The 63-year-old was transferred to Hartford (Conn.) Hospital but when she arrived, the physician disagreed with that diagnosis, according to the report.
Dr. Asad Rizvi said in an affidavit that because Ms. Mills was exposed to COVID-19 at work and because experts believed heart inflammation was a symptom of the virus, he could not admit her to the cardiac unit without testing her for the virus.
Ms. Mills was isolated in a regular room and monitored for four days until her COVID-19 test results came back negative at 7:40 p.m. March 24. At 6 a.m. March 25, a physician ordered for her to be transferred to the cardiac unit, but hospital staff found Ms. Mills dead on her bathroom floor of a major heart attack.
Her estate sued the hospital. Superior Court Judge Matthew Budzik ruled that the hospital had immunity for the first four days of Ms. Mills' stay, but once her COVID-19 test results came back negative, the hospital may not have had immunity. The case could determine how far hospital immunity extends and could affect other potential lawsuits against hospitals and nursing homes over the deaths of loved ones during the pandemic.
On April 5, 2020, two weeks after Mills' death, the governor issued executive order 7U, which shielded nursing homes and hospitals from civil liability except in cases of crime, fraud, malice, gross negligence or willful misconduct.
The judge dismissed all the claims against the physicians' up until Ms. Mills' test results were known. He ruled once hospital officials knew she did not have the virus, they were no longer covered by the state immunity order. Therefore, the lawsuit could proceed covering the hours after her COVID-19 test results were known, according to the report.
"This is a heart attack case, not a COVID-19 case," Mills' attorney Elisabeth Swanson said in the report. "We don't think the governor's order was intended to cover what happened here. We aren't attacking the order itself. We want to make sure it is being interpreted narrowly — for the actual treatment of COVID-19 patients and to not be used to give them a pass on medical malpractice."
Attorneys for Hartford HealthCare, the owners of Hartford Hospital, are appealing the judge's ruling, arguing the event is "an archetypal case for immunity" under the governor's order.
"Doctors had a good faith belief that a patient complaining principally of a sore throat and a headache had COVID-19 and doubted she was having a heart attack," Hartford HealthCare's attorney Brendan Gooley wrote in his Supreme Court brief. "That good faith belief regarding COVID-19 immediately, substantially, and irreversibly altered the patient's treatment. This is a prototypical case for immunity, not a case on the outer limits of immunity. Whatever the outer limits of immunity are, they are not tested here."