Bengaluru, October 23 (India Today) – The lungs of a 62-year-old patient who died of coronavirus were found “hard as a leather ball” during an autopsy in Karnataka.
Presence of coronavirus in body even after death
As per a report in The Times of India, the first autopsy of a coronavirus patient revealed the presence of the virus in nasal and throat swab samples even 18 hours after death.
Dr Dinesh Rao of Oxford Medical College, who performed the autopsy, said the lungs of the patient were “hard as a leather ball”, with air sacks ruptured and clots in the blood vessels.
“Autopsy of Covid victims helps in understanding the disease progression,” Rao, who heads the forensic medicine department, told TOI. The procedure was completed in an hour and 10 minutes on October 10 and the last of the microscopic evidence came on Wednesday.
Coronavirus patient’s body can be infectious after death
According to the report. Rao took five swab samples from the cadaver’s nose, throat and mouth, lung surface, respiratory passages (trachea, bronchi) and skin on the face and neck. The nose and throat samples were positive for coronavirus, RTPCR tests showed. “This means that a Covid patient’s body can be infectious. Most surprisingly, it was negative on the skin,” TOI quoted Rao as saying.
The autopsy was conducted with the family’s consent, as per TOI. When the patient died, his family members were either in home isolation or quarantine and could not claim the body. “My findings are unique to the findings seen in autopsy reports from the US and Italy. This could mean the virus strains seen in India are different,” Rao told TOI.
Rao plans to publish his findings in a peer-reviewed journal.
(With inputs from TOI)
