It’s quite the eye-catching headline: “Covid May Spread From Corpses, Studies Say.” New York Times COVID reporter Apoorva Mandavilli is back, the author of yet another alarmist COVID story.
When the shock wears off, and after one notes that the study it’s based on has yet to undergo peer-review, the bottom line is pretty simple: Don’t handle corpses, it might be bad for you, in case you didn’t know that already. And then there's yet another big Mandavilli math error in the direction of alarmism.
Like a zombie in a horror film, the coronavirus can persist in the bodies of infected patients well after death, even spreading to others, according to two startling studies.
The risk of contagion is mainly to those who handle cadavers, like pathologists, medical examiners and health care workers, and in settings like hospitals and nursing homes, where many deaths may occur.
While transmission from corpses is not likely to be a major factor in the pandemic, bereaved family members should exercise caution, experts said.
“In some countries, people who have died of Covid-19 are being left unattended or taken back to their homes,” said Hisako Saitoh, a researcher at Chiba University in Japan who published two recent studies on the phenomenon.
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Several studies have found traces of infectious virus in corpses for as long as 17 days after death. Dr. Saitoh and his colleagues went further, showing that dead bodies may carry significant amounts of infectious virus, and that dead hamsters can transmit it to live cage mates.
The research has not yet been vetted for publication in a scientific journal, but outside experts said that the studies were well-done and the results compelling.
Mandavilli confessed it’s not really an American problem:
In the United States, bodies usually are embalmed soon after death or cremated. But in the Netherlands, where Dr. Munster grew up, as in many parts of the world, family members may wash and dress the bodies.
She dragged the deadly Ebola virus into the mix, and that’s where the error occurred -- ironically, in one of Mandavilli’s few attempts to calm fears rather than raise them.
Contagious corpses are not without precedent. Most famously, funeral and burial practices have triggered large outbreaks of Ebola virus in Africa.
But the coronavirus is very different, noted Angela Rasmussen, a research scientist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.
The story originally read in part, “up to 70 percent of those infected with Ebola die, compared with about 3 percent of those diagnosed with Covid-19.” Three percent is far too high a rate, as many conservatives recognized at once, but not Mandavilli or the “science”-loving editors at the Times.
The paper’s correction gave it some wiggle room (there is also debate over the “case fatality rate” and the “infection fatality rate,” the latter being lower):
An earlier version of this article misstated the death rate for Covid patients. It is now 1 percent or less, not about 3 percent. Because of an editing error, the corrected sentence omitted the phrase “diagnosed with” in reference to the rate.
Mandavilli has a well-documented history of being bad with COVID numbers, whoppers that are invariably made in the more alarmist direction. It’s an ominous trait for a science reporter, one who actually was part of a coverage team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the pandemic.
