Covid-19 Attacks Blood Vessels, Creates Strange Clots

Sol Schulman, a hematologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center I’d interviewed, wrote recently to tell me about some new clues to an ominous connection emerging between Covid-19 and strokes. The new clues came from autopsies.

I’d originally contacted Schulman about some small studies of patients, which used autopsies on only a few subjects — 11 in one and 14 in another. Why so few when there are hundreds of thousands of people around the world dying from Covid-19? Experts say the once-standard practice had declined before the pandemic as paperwork and consent become more burdensome. Now extra precautions are needed to protect the pathologists from infection.