COVID-19 claims life of Lincoln County man

The Lincoln County Health Department reported March 25 that it had received notice of the county’s first positive test for novel coronavirus. A day later, the elderly man died.

G. Scott Tomlin said he was not able to speak to his 77-year-old father during Jim Tomlin’s final days, a reality that made the loss of his father to complications linked to COVID-19 especially painful.

Since then, the health department has reported three additional positive tests for coronavirus. Two cases were related to the first positive test and “exposure occurred out of state,” the department reported. The fourth positive case is a man in his 20s who had traveled in Montana.

Scott Tomlin said his father had recently made a road trip to California and back.

Jim and Marcia Hunter Tomlin lived on Bull Lake in Lincoln County. Jim was Montana’s first fatality linked to the respiratory disease.

Scott Tomlin’s narrative on Facebook of his father’s rapidly worsening illness describes Jim Tomlin’s transport by ambulance from Libby to the hospital in Kalispell, where he was placed on a respirator. Scott Tomlin said that by 9 p.m. on March 25 his father was in a medically induced coma and in critical condition. Around noon on March 26 the family learned that Jim Tomlin had about a 5 percent chance of survival. By 4:30 p.m. the end was near.

“Last rites were given over the phone,” Scott Tomlin wrote on Facebook. “His wife got to say goodbye and that [his] children love him, over the phone.”

Scott said both Jim Tomlin and Marcia, his stepmother, were retired high school teachers. Jim, a native of Washington state, taught biology, along with some aerospace and some humanities. He had suffered from Parkinson’s disease.

Scott said his father had an uncanny ability to make friends and be friends.

He said keeping a distance from other family during his father’s last days was profoundly difficult.

“I could not go to him. I could not comfort my stepmother. I could not comfort my sisters,” he said.

Health officials reported a second positive case in Lincoln County on March 26, noting that the person had had direct contact with a known positive case. The department declined to release additional information about the individual involved, citing patient confidentiality and referencing the desire to protect the safety of the individual and their family.

The next day, the Lincoln County Health Department reported the third positive case.

Jennifer McCully, public health manager for Lincoln County, said the health department wanted to protect patient confidentiality for myriad reasons, including the potential that they or family members might be affected by stigma associated with COVID-19.

She said the health department began receiving phone calls from people who were fearful after the first COVID-19 case was identified in Lincoln County.

“Just because you live in the same community does not mean you have had exposure,” she said.

Statewide, as of mid-day March 30, Montana had recorded 171 positive cases of coronavirus and two deaths. The second death involved a resident of Madison County. Gallatin County led the state with 67 reported cases. Flathead County had reported nine.

The Cut Bank Pioneer Press reported that a resident of Toole County had also died from complications of COVID-19 but she had not yet been added to the official tally.

Lincoln County’s Central Testing Site, which offers drive-through testing for people who have been referred because of symptoms or who have been approved for testing because they fit a high-risk profile, continued to operate through March 27 and will resume testing March 30.

The site is set up in the parking lot for the Center for Asbestos Related Disease in Libby and employees from the center are helping to staff the effort. The site will be open Monday through Friday, noon to 3 p.m., unless there is a shortage of personal protective equipment or testing supplies.

McCully told members of the county’s Board of Health during a March 27 special meeting that stocks of personal protective equipment were starting to trickle in but that the supply of nasal swabs used in testing was becoming limited.

“We will be receiving swabs by Monday,” she said then.

Mark Peck, chairman of the Lincoln County Board of Commissioners and a member of the Board of Health, said March 27 that county residents seem to be responding admirably to a trying time by taking care of each other.

The Lincoln County coronavirus information line is (406) 293-6295.