Pathological features of COVID-19 infection from biopsy and autopsy series

Abstract

Novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) which is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was first identified in December 2019 in Chinese town Wuhan and considered as a pandemic by World Health Organization. The disease has variety of symptoms including fever, shortness of breath, cough, fatigue, loss of smell and taste and diarrhea. While the majority of cases have mild symptoms, some progress to viral pneumonia, multi-organ failure, or cytokine storm and mortality is mostly caused by hypoxemic respiratory failure. Until now, more than 3.5 million people worldwide were infected and more than 240.000 mortality has been occurred. Thus, there is now evidence the disease may affect variety of organs according to accumulating biopsy and autopsy studies. Such pathological studies have potential role on the understanding of clinical outcomes and in the development of novel targeted therapeutic approaches. Given these aforementioned data, in the current manuscript we have summarized the pathological features of COVID-19 derived from biopsy and autopsy series.