Postmortem Stability of SARS-CoV-2 in Mouse Lung Tissue

Abstract

The infectivity of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 in deceased persons and organisms remains unclear. We studied transgenic K18 hACE2 mice to determine the kinetics of virus infectivity after host death. Five days after death, virus infectivity in the lung declined by >96% and RNA copies declined by 48.2%.

Keywords

• SARS-CoV-2
• infectious virus
• antigen
• RT-PCR
• K18 hACE2 mice
• TCID50