Case Report: Post-mortem Histopathological and Molecular Analyses of the Very First Documented COVID-19-Related Death in Europe
Milenko Bogdanović, Ivan Skadrić, Tatjana Atanasijević, Oliver Stojković, Vesna Popović, Slobodan Savić, Zoran Mihailović, Bojana Radnić, T. Acimovic, Irina Damjanjuk, Sanja Despotović, Aleksandra Barać
Abstract
In Europe, the first case of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and the first COVID-19-related death were reported in France on January 24th and February 15th, 2020, respectively. Officially, the first case of COVID-19 infection in the Republic of Serbia was registered on March 6th. Herein, we presented the first case of retrospective detection of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in the post-mortem-obtained vitreous humor (VH), which took place on February 5th, 2020. This is the first death in Europe proven to be caused by COVID-19 by means of post-mortem histopathological and molecular analyses. Based on this finding, it appears that SARS-CoV-2 has been spreading faster and started spreading much earlier than it had been considered and that COVID-19 was probably the cause of the much-reported pneumonia of unknown origin in January and February 2020.