Japan postmortems of COVID-infected patients finds virus stays in half

The fact that there were only 11 postmortem examinations in 2021 means that Japan was avoiding them at all costs.

Nonsense... I will never understand the chaotic handling of the COVID in this country.

Japan handled covid excellently, keeping deaths low, with no true lockdowns, in an extremely densely populated country.

"Ghost" Covid.... Are they trying to make people scared of the dead? lol

A virus that lives in your body after you are dead. It really couldn't get any uglier.

PCR tests on 30 nasopharyngeal mucosa and lung tissue samples...

It's all based on PCR tests, which does not tell us anything about the viability of the virus. Just like in the early days of the pandemic when they were saying that the virus remains on surfaces for weeks. It took a while to realize that viability was lost rapidly.

I wonder if the virus persisting in certain parts of the body explains long COVID in certain patients. They continue to test negative and are not contagious, but the virus may be persisting in some tissue or organ somewhere causing the body's immune system to react and cause symptoms. It's hard to know for sure because long COVID patients are still alive and we can't do thorough research on their organs.

It everywhere even reproductive tract

It's all based on PCR tests, which does not tell us anything about the viability of the virus. 

For DNA viruses this may be the case, but for RNA viruses the detection of the genetic material means the genome is still protected from the naturally present RNAses, which indicates the virus structure is preserved enough to protect the RNA and therefore still infectious. The negative results from bodies treated with formaldehyde also indicate the same (with evidence of quick neutralization).

Virus neutralization assays are much more difficult to do, so this kind of indirect evidence is the usual first step to evaluate the risk.

I wonder if the virus persisting in certain parts of the body explains long COVID in certain patients. 

Obviously persistance is not the same in a living person than in dead tissue, but this is one of the different proposed mechanisms already studied and demonstrated in some cases (among other different causes). Fortunaely vaccination seems to have a role preventing this.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41418-022-01052-6

The fact that there were only 11 postmortem examinations in 2021 means that Japan was avoiding them at all costs.

There would have been zero examinations if that's the case

Nonsense... I will never understand the chaotic handling of the COVID in this country.

Well did you understand the chaotic handling of covid in other countries?

A virus that lives in your body after you are dead. It really couldn't get any uglier.

Covid virus isn't unique in that aspect

Also why do such articles never put a link to the original research?

Do you usually link to original sources in news articles ?

Who would think that people who died and had something inside their systems before their dead, will continue to have that something in their bodies for a while?!

I mean, this happens with basically most virus, but who cares about those other virus, if it is covid, even if it means absolutely nothing, we will vaguely imply something scarry, and make this into one of the top news of the day.

It's also pretty sad that somehow for some people if a loved one dies it seems that one of the first things they think is about not getting covid out of the cold dead body that isn't even breathing.

I wonder if they put masks in those bodies "just in case".

A new study out of Denmark shows that the mRNA was still in peoples blood after 28 days !

https://youtu.be/fWVxVd6IGgg

As the dead aren’t breathing anymore then what’s the problem?

@Ichigo

Good remark.

Chicken pox is a well known virus that stays forever in your body even after recovering. It may trigger other illnesses.

I experienced that myself for that virus, so it is obvious it is happening in some for covid.

There is not much we can do and research enables to find medicine which can tame those consequences.

As the dead aren’t breathing anymore then what’s the problem?

Possibility of infecting the living obviously

DaninthepanToday 08:20 am JST

A virus that lives in your body after you are dead. It really couldn't get any uglier.

Yup, they really cooked up something awful in that lab :(

death from pneumonia

I assume that these patients, with COVID virus in their lungs even two weeks after death, were reported as pneumonia deaths, rather than COVID deaths?

Other than that, yes, a virus stays active in a refrigerated dead body for two months. Nothing new here. But, after 3 years of a viral pandemic, why are people still totally oblivious when it comes to the most basic knowledge of viral infections?

for RNA viruses the detection of the genetic material means the genome is still protected from the naturally present RNAses, which indicates the virus structure is preserved enough to protect the RNA and therefore still infectious.

No, that is incorrect. It does not indicate it is infectious. That is why some do actually go through the trouble of measuring the infectious viral load using cell cultures, rather than a just PCR.

No, that is incorrect. It does not indicate it is infectious. 

Again, that the virus proteins are conserved enough to preserve the genetic material clearly indicate the virus particles are much more likely to still be infectious. That is the difference with DNA viruses that do not suffer the same degree of degradation. As the portion of the comment that you choose not to quote clearly says the direct way to measure infectivity is more complicated, but the detection of the conserved RNA is an indirect way to measure virus capsid conservation, which helps measuring infectivity.

Again, if this was not the case there would be no difference with the lack of detection from samples of formaldehyde treated bodies, the RNA would be as degraded with or without a conserved capsid, which obviously is not the case.

I assume that these patients, with COVID virus in their lungs even two weeks after death, were reported as pneumonia deaths, rather than COVID deaths?

The cause of death comes from the primary cause that originates or contributes importantly to the development of the final cause. People that are stabbed and die get this as a cause, not just "loss of blood".

virusrexToday  02:42 pm JST

The cause of death comes from the primary cause that originates or contributes importantly to the development of the final cause. People that are stabbed and die get this as a cause, not just "loss of blood".

That is wrong.

First of all, "primary cause" or "final cause" is not the correct wording. Simply "cause of death" is used, and then "Immediate cause" is the appropriate term for the final disease or condition that results in death.

So, in your stabbing hypothetical the "immediate cause" (which would be listed first), would be something like "exsanguination" (blood loss) or "hemorrhagic shock".

The stabbing would not be the "primary cause". Prior to that description would be an "underlying cause" such as perforation of stomach.

The stabbing would be described last, as an underlying cause.

That is wrong.

First of all, "primary cause" or "final cause" is not the correct wording. Simply "cause of death" is used, and then "Immediate cause" is the appropriate term for the final disease or condition that results in death.

What reference do you have to prove that the wording is not correct? you obviously understand that the article is talking about what is happening in Japan, so you need the correct wording for the Japanese system.

Making up arbitrary categories do not make it incorrect a different one. Specially when it is commonly used, contrary to your claim.

For example

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/324561

The primary or underlying cause of death is defined as that condition or injury (or circumstances of the injury) that initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death. 

According to this usage the condition or injury that initiated the events leading to death would not be wrong to be described as "primary cause", it is a valid denomination. In this case covid as the original event that end up causing the pneumonia (or any of the other pathologies that cause death on the patients) is the "primary cause" without problems, and it would be registered this way. In the example "stabbing" (or the more correctly described as "lacerating wound" etc.) can also be described without any problem as a "primary cause" because it is the injury that initiates the pathology that ends up causing death.

So, what references do you have to prove this way of categorizing the cause of death is "wrong" as you claim? obviously there are different ways to do it with different nomenclatures, but having several ways do not make a different one "wrong", it only makes it different.

That's an article from 1958(!).

lol

No, that is incorrect. It does not indicate it is infectious. 

Again, that the virus proteins are conserved enough to preserve the genetic material clearly indicate the virus particles are much more likely to still be infectious.

Well of course it is more likely to be infectious if you detect the virus RNA by PCR than if you do not detect it. But it does not mean that the virus is intact enough to infect, it just means that the RNA is protected enough to not be completely degraded.

That is why very early on in the pandemic they were wrongly claiming that we can get infected from virus that was on money or other surfaces for weeks.

Anyway, I realize that we will never agree on anything so I will simply end on this quote from a paper describing a new method to measure SARSCoV-2 viability:

"A majority of the studies for SARS-CoV-2 stability on surfaces have been conducted using the reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) analytical method to detect viral RNA. The RT-PCR does not distinguish between active (and potentially infectious) and inactive (noninfectious) virus presence, and therefore, SARS-CoV-2 RNA detected from surface samples could also be from inactive virus."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8349479/