39-Year-Old New Orleans Woman, Once Feared a Coronavirus Victim, Died of Heart Condition

You may recall the story about the death of Natasha Ott. She was the 39-year-old from New Orleans whose story made national news after her boyfriend's social media post.

It appears that Ott died naturally of a weakened heart and not coronavirus, as feared by her boyfriend, Josh Anderson. Those findings were released yesterday by a coroner's official.

The cause of Ott's death on March 30 has been listed as "dilated cardiomyopathy with remote myocardial infarct," Orleans Parish Coroner Dr. Dwight McKenna's office said. A myocardial infarction is a heart attack.

Ott was found dead on her kitchen floor back in March. Anderson claimed in a social media post that spread nationally that Ott died from coronavirus, but that never materialized.

The test Ott took before she died came back negative after her death, according to family members.

Her death came less than two weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the city. Doubts were plentiful regarding the risks of COVID-19 to the young and healthy.

As we later learned, the virus doesn't strike those in Ott's demographic, although the young are not immune. In Louisiana, just 59 of the nearly 3,000 coronavirus-related deaths involved people younger than 40. On the flip side, more than two-thirds of those who have died were over 70.

But this information was not widely known when Anderson posted his somber account of Ott's decline over her last few days.

The autopsy for Ott was performed in late March, and those findings were released on Wednesday.

Natasha Ott, a native of Claremont, California, had been a social worker with the nonprofit health clinic CrescentCare beginning in 2017.