Bosnia Authorities Argue Over Risk of COVID-19 Autopsies

Bosnia's Serb-majority entity, Republika Srpska, RS, will continue to perform autopsies of people who have died from the coronavirus, its health minister said on Thursday.

This comes after the state association of forensic pathologists said earlier that such autopsies should be stopped in the current circumstances.

The RS Health and Social Protection Minister, Alen Seranic, said health and court institutes in the entity had agreed a protocol for performing autopsies of people who had died following infection with COVID-19.

"There is no risk whatsoever when you are performing an autopsy of an infected person because the virus is no longer active when a person dies. It dies because the virus needs a living cell for reproduction," Seranic told a daily briefing.

On Thursday, the Federation entity's deputy health minister, Goran Cerkez, said he was not aware of a problem concerning autopsies in Bosnia's other entity. He said he saw no reason for doctors stopping from performing them.

"They can be done very simply. No special measures are needed except for a visor. The other equipment is the same as for any other autopsy," he said.

But the Association of Court Medical Specialists in Bosnia and Herzegovina on Monday said no further autopsies should be conducted on coronavirus victims until the authorities had provided better protective equipment and a safer working environment for the 14 court medicine specialists and their assistants.

It said no institutions in the country had suitable chambers for such "high-risk autopsies" to be done, quoting unspecified statistics from other countries fighting the pandemic that up to 50 per cent of those who were tested for COVID-19 may not have shown any symptoms but were still contagious.<...