ABOVE: A blood clot under the microscope
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In mid-March, pathologist Sigurd Lax pulled on a water-repellant surgery coat, a surgical cap, special booties to cover his shoes, a respiratory mask, and two pairs of gloves, then walked into an operating room at Hospital Graz II in Austria. There before him lay a patient who died of COVID-19 only 48 hours earlier.
“COVID-19 is a new disease, and we really want to know what’s underlying it,” Lax says. There’s only one method to determine what causes illness and death. “It’s doing an autopsy.”
Methodically, Lax sliced into the patient, taking care not to spray any bodily fluids into the air. He’d waited two days to perform the autopsy to reduce the risk of transmitting SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. With little known about the illness at the time, he and his colleagues wanted to take extra precautions to ...
