Can you catch coronavirus from a dead body? It’s a possibility, researchers say

People who passed away from the new coronavirus may still be contagious after death, researchers say, but how long bodies can possibly be infectious remains a mystery.

The possibility raises health safety concerns for forensic scientists and other workers who handle the dead as the global death toll continues to rise, overwhelming hospitals, nursing homes and funeral homes with piles of bodies.

As of Friday morning, the U.S. alone had more than 33,000 deaths and at least 662,000 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2, the virus driving the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The warning about the potential infectiousness of dead bodies came from Won Sriwijitalai of the RVT Medical Center in Bangkok, Thailand, and Viroj Wiwanitkit of the Hainan Medical University in Haikou, China.

Other researchers not involved with the published letter said it is possible that a deceased person could still pass on the highly contagious virus.

“Absolutely, a dead body would be contagious at least for hours if not days,” Otto Yang, a professor in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, told Live Science in an email.

News broke about a forensic practitioner in Bangkok, Thailand, who tested positive in March for the virus, according to a letter to the editor published last week in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine.

The authors noted the employee must have been infected while working with a deceased patient who could have had Covid-19, the disease the virus causes.

“Although patients may get the infection from workplace exposure or through spreading in the community, at the period of the occurrence of this case, the patients in Thailand are mostly imported cases and recording of local spreading in the community is limited,” the researchers wrote. “There is low chance of forensic medicine professionals coming into contact with infected patients, but they can have contact with biological samples and corpses.

“At present, there is no data on the exact number of COVID-19 contaminated corpses since it is not a routine practice to examine for COVID-19 in dead bodies in Thailand,” the researchers continued in the paper.

The employee later succumbed to the virus, marking the first death on record of a medical professional in the forensic medicine unit, the researchers said.

But how are dead bodies still infectious?

Dr. Yang of UCLA told Live Science the virus can still be hiding in respiratory secretions that can come out of the nose or mouth. The pathogen can also still be reproducing in lung cells that haven’t yet died.

Soft tissues like muscles, nerves and fat in a dead body could also pose risk of infection, according to the International Society for Infectious Diseases.

Medical examiners and morgue workers often come in contact with these tissues and bodily fluids during autopsies, for example.

At the time of the Bangkok employee’s death, researchers said most cases in Thailand were imported and did not come from community spread, “so it’s unlikely that the forensic practitioner caught the new coronavirus outside of work or even from a patient at the hospital.”

However, the researchers do not make clear whether the “forensic practitioner” was involved with the intersection of law and medicine, which the term usually means, or with pathology, the study of bodies to understand the cause and effect of diseases, Alex Williamson, the chief of autopsy pathology at Northwell Health and a member of the College of American Pathologists’ autopsy committee, told Popular Science.

Williamson said the risk of getting infected is always present for these types of medical workers, but autopsies on those dying from Covid-19 are critical.

“Autopsy is an important way to gain knowledge about how a disease is affecting our body, how it’s interacting with preexisting conditions, and how it’s playing out in different people,” he told Popular Science. “We can’t and shouldn’t autopsy everyone, but we need to examine a subset to better understand why people who get really sick are dying.”

The letter said forensic professionals should wear protective gear similar to those worn by hospital staff dealing with infected patients, such as protective suits, gloves, goggles, masks, and caps.

The World Health Organization said most infectious agents do not survive long in a human body after death.

But diseases like tuberculosis, bloodborne viruses like HIV and gastrointestinal infections like cholera and E. coli may affect workers who routinely handle corpses who died from these illnesses, WHO said.

This story was originally published April 17, 2020 at 12:46 PM.