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– A Christmas gift wrapping session got a little alarming (and very weird) over the weekend when a woman from Illinois found a surprise in the package she ordered from Kohl’s. Andrea Ellis tells Quad-City Times She was preparing presents at her aunt’s house in East Moline when she picked up some garden flags she ordered for her grandmother in a yellow padded envelope from Kohl’s. After she took out the flags and packing slip, she said she saw “a little deeper” in the envelope, and when she pulled it out, she was shocked at what she saw. “It was a biohazard bag with someone’s COVID-19 test sample,” she says. The bag was labeled with a woman’s name, date of birth, and contact information for her doctor in Richmond, Virginia, where the Kohl’s package had been shipped.
Ellis says she called the police, but the cop who came by said he couldn’t take it. Instead, the matter was referred to the Rock Island County health department, East Moline police chief Jeff Ramsey told the AP. Janet Hill, the COO of the health department, says her desk now has the biohazard bag and it appears to contain a nasal swab and patient information. “I’ve never heard of anything like it,” she says. “I want this person to know that the test hasn’t been done yet.” Her department is trying to contact health officials in Virginia to locate the patient, and Ellis even attempted to contact the patient online after finding her on LinkedIn; she hasn’t heard anything yet. Meanwhile, Kohl’s has apologized for “this very unusual and inexplicable experience” and says it has begun an investigation, noting that the package did not come directly from Kohl’s, but from an “outside direct ship vendor”. (Read more COVID-19 stories.)