Experts believe performing autopsies on the bodies of people who have died of COVID-19 could provide greater insight into the virus, and how it affects the body.
Only hundreds of autopsies have been performed so far out of five million people who have died of Covid worldwide.
This is due to a mix of reasons including some autopsy clinics closing and other medical systems phasing the practice out.
Autopsies were once the method of choice for medical professionals to determine cause of death and other factors leading to a person's demise, but have been replaced by modern technology.
The procedures still have some use, though, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is planning an investment of more than $1 billion to learn more about the virus, which includes more autopsies of Covid patients, reports Bloomberg.
Autopsies have not been performed on many of the five million people that have died of Covid worldwide, but some experts believe they could be the key to figuring out how the virus affects someone's body. The NIH is planning a $1 billion investment into learning more about the virus, which will include autopsies (file photo)
Autopsies allow experts to find exactly what was happening in a person's body the moment that they die, experts tell Bloomberg.
Because Covid patients die at different points of infection, a large sample of autopsies can help doctors create a timeline of to how the virus spread throughout the body, and what exactly it does.
'It's critically important that thousands of autopsies are done, so we can put this picture together,' Dr Jeffery Taubenberger, head of the viral pathogenesis and evolution section of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the NIH, told Bloomberg.
'What we're trying to figure out here is, what goes wrong under the worst circumstances where people die - to try to understand how the virus causes disease in less severe cases.
'And then: What are the therapeutic implications of that?'
More autopsies could also give experts a greater look into how 'long Covid' works as well.
The mysterious condition occurs when recovered Covid patients still feel side effects of the virus months after recovery and has baffled experts becasuse there is little explanation for why or how it happens.
Long Covid can also strike in many ways, with some people losing their sense of taste and smell for long periods of time and others being left extremely fatigued and
