...

So, long and short, we set up a system where we collaborated with a number of hospitals from the University of Maryland Medical System, a number of hospitals around the state all the way to the Eastern Shore, to both downtown Baltimore and a number of other regions, where if there were COVID deaths, we would hear about them. And that if families or next of kin were interested in participating in our research study, we would recruit them [and arrange the] transfer of the remains here to the NIH Clinic Clinical Center. We worked with the pathologist from the National Cancer Institute, the NCI pathologist. My lab team and the pathologist were integrated where we would do these very detailed autopsies. We have done 44 autopsies to date, and we collect and preserve specimens across the whole body and brain, and that means that it is a hundred or so different sites across the whole body. We preserve those tissues to really ask two questions: “Where is the virus across all the body?” and subsets of that question are: “What tissues?”, and then specifically “What cells within those tissues?” Above and beyond that, we don’t just look for RNA, but we try to determine “Is the virus that is in those cells replicating or not?” “Is it viable or not?” Those have implications for questions about persistence in different sites, so that was one of our questions. And then the second question was: “In all those places that you found virus, how did the body respond?

...