Coronavirus autopsies: A story of 38 brains, 87 lungs and 42 hearts
What we’ve learned from the dead that could help the living.
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
July 1, 2020 at 12:09 p.m. EDT
When pathologist Amy Rapkiewicz began the grim process of opening up the coronavirus dead to learn how their bodies went awry, she found damage to the lungs, kidneys and liver consistent with what doctors had reported for months.
But something was off.
Rapkiewicz, who directs autopsies at NYU Langone Health, noticed that some organs had far too many of a special type of cell rarely found in those places. She had never seen that before, yet it seemed vaguely familiar. She raced to her history books and — in a eureka moment — found a reference to 1960′s report on a patient with dengue fever.
In dengue, a mosquito-borne tropical disease, she learned, the virus appeared to destroy these cells, which produce platelets, leading to uncontrolled bleeding. The novel coronavirus seemed to amplify their effect, causing dangerous clotting.
She was struck by the parallels: “Covid-19 and dengue sound really different, but the cells that are involved are similar.”
Autopsies have long been a source of breakthroughs in understanding new diseases, from HIV/AIDS and Ebola, to Lassa fever — and the medical community is counting on them to do the same for covid-19, the disease caused by coronavirus. With a vaccine likely many months away, autopsies are becoming a critical source of information for research into possible treatments.
When the pandemic hit the United States in late March, many hospital systems were too overwhelmed trying to save lives to spend too much time delving into the secrets of the dead. But by late May and June, the first large batch of reports — from patients who died at a half-dozen different institutions — were published in quick succession. The investigations have confirmed some of our early hunches of the disease, refuted others — and opened up new mysteries about the novel pathogen that has killed more than 500,000 people worldwide.
much more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/07/01/coronavirus-autopsies-findings/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most
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