Doctors believe that autopsies could provide more information on how COVID-19 affects the body and causes death, but in reality, the autopsy affected only a tiny fraction of the 5 million deaths from coronavirus worldwide. Meanwhile, autopsy has already led to many discoveries, such as the discovery that coronavirus can travel outside the respiratory system and affect the liver and brain.
Experts believe autopsies of people who have died from COVID-19 could provide a better understanding of the coronavirus and how it affects the body. Meanwhile, according to the Daily Mail, so far only hundreds of autopsies have been carried out out of the five million people who have died from Covid worldwide. This is due to a variety of reasons, including the closure of some clinical facilities where autopsies were performed and the discontinuation of practice by other medical systems.
Autopsy was once the method of choice for medical professionals to determine the cause of death and other factors leading to a person’s death, but modern technology has replaced them. However, procedures are still in use, and the National Institute of Health (NIH) plans to invest more than $ 1 billion to learn more about the virus, including additional necropsies on COVID patients, Bloomberg reported.
An autopsy allows experts to establish exactly what was going on in a person’s body at the time of his death, Bloomberg experts say. Since COVID patients die at different times of infection, a large sample of autopsies can help doctors chart how the virus spreads through the body and what exactly it does. “It is imperative that thousands of autopsies are done so we can get this picture,” Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger, head of viral pathogenesis and evolution at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, told Bloomberg. “We’re trying to figure out what goes wrong in the worst circumstances, when people die, to try to understand how the virus causes illness in less severe cases. And then: what are the therapeutic implications of this? “
Additional autopsies could also give experts more insight into how long COVID has been in effect. The mysterious condition occurs when patients who have recovered from the coronavirus still feel the side effects of the virus several months after they recover, and confuses experts as there is little explanation as to why or how this happens. “Long-term COVID” can also strike in many ways: some people lose their sense of taste and smell for extended periods of time, while others remain extremely tired and bedridden for months.
Autopsies on dead patients will allow experts to gather data on how to treat recovered COVID patients, as well as information on their symptoms.
“Post-covid phenomena are very, very real,” Dr. Daniel Chertov, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, told Bloomberg. “If you are going to come up with ways to prevent or treat these symptoms, you need to understand what drives them.”
Many autopsy clinics closed during the pandemic because they were not considered necessary. In retrospect, these decisions actually hurt the medical industry in developing treatments for the virus.
Dr. Klaus Puschel, a German scientist who runs an autopsy clinic in Hamburg, told Bloomberg that he is ignoring local regulations and keeping his clinic open. His team performed 80 autopsies on patients who died from COVID-19 and made groundbreaking discoveries. They found that the virus can spread outside the respiratory system to the kidneys, heart, liver, and even the brain.
The clinic also found that COVID patients had defective capillaries in the brain – small blood vessels that can be responsible for some of the cognitive problems like brain fog and memory problems that people experience as a result of the virus.
While these discoveries were medical breakthroughs, they also raised concerns among experts. “Will there be any subclinical effects on your brain that cause neurocognitive problems later in life that may not be immediately noticed or detected? – asks Dr. Daniel Devilry. “If you are going to come up with ways to prevent or treat these manifestations – either in the next group that may be identified or in the group that is suffering – you need to understand what the driving forces are.”
An autopsy is very intensive and nevertheless very expensive. The procedure can cost anywhere from $ 2,000 to $ 4,000, and the premises themselves are also very expensive to operate. At a time when medical resources are scarce, investing so much money, labor and equipment in a deceased person can often seem impractical for the health system. Bloomberg reports that many doctors instead choose to use X-rays, MRIs and other existing instruments to determine the cause of death of some patients. This technology is much easier to use and does not require as much manual work as opening. Performing an autopsy, especially on a coronavirus patient, requires doctors to use a lot of heavy and bulky equipment. They also need to collect more than 100 separate samples from their entire bodies due to the use of the diffuse shot method to find out how the virus works. Then each of the samples must be examined individually, which adds extra work to the process.
“Autopsies are expensive,” Dr. Linda Isles, head of forensic science at the Victorian Forensic Institute in Melbourne, Australia, told Bloomberg. “Actually, not many people want to spend money on the dead.”
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