The autopsy, seen as a fading practice, revealed secrets of the coronavirus
NEW YORK » The COVID-19 pandemic has helped revive the autopsy.
When the virus first arrived in U.S. hospitals, doctors could only guess what was causing its strange constellation of symptoms: What could explain why patients were losing their sense of smell and taste, developing skin rashes, struggling to breathe and reporting memory loss on top of flu-like coughs and aches?
At hospital morgues, which have been steadily losing prominence and funding over several decades, pathologists were busily dissecting the disease’s first victims — and finding some answers.
“We were getting emails from clinicians, kind of desperate, asking, ‘ What are you seeing?’” said NYU Langone’s Dr. Amy Rapkiewicz. ‘Autopsy,’ she pointed out, means to see for yourself. “That’s exactly what we had to do.”
Early autopsies of deceased patients confirmed the coronavirus does not just cause respiratory disease, but can also attack other vital organs. They also led doctors to try blood thinners in some COVID-19 patients and reconsider how long others should be on ventilators.
“You can’t treat what you don’t know about,” said Dr. Alex Williamson, a pathologist at Northwell Health in New York. “Many lives have been saved by looking closely at someone’s death.”
Autopsies have informed medicine for centuries — most recently helping to reveal the extent of the opioid epidemic, improve cancer care and demystify AIDS and anthrax. Hospitals were once judged by how many autopsies they performed.
But they’ve lost stature over the years as the medical world instead turned to lab tests and imaging scans. In 1950, the practice was conducted on about half of deceased hospital patients. Today, those rates have shrunk to somewhere between 5% and 11%.
Some hospitals found it even harder this year. Safety concerns about transmission forced many hospital administrators to stop or seriously curb autopsies in 2020. The pandemic also led to a general dip in the total number patients at many hospitals, which drove down autopsy rates in some places. Large hospitals around the country have reported conducting fewer autopsies in 2020.