Man killed by coronavirus had organ damage similar to that caused by Sars, study finds

The new coronavirus attacks the body in similar ways to Sars and Mers, according to Chinese researchers involved in a new medical study based on an autopsy of one of the ongoing outbreak’s victims, who had suffered lung and liver damage.

The report, published this week in British medical journal The Lancet by experts from the Fifth Medical Centre of the People’s Liberation Army’s General Hospital in Beijing, obtained biopsy samples from the autopsy of a 50-year-old man who died in late January of Covid-19 – the formal name for the pneumonia-like disease caused by the coronavirus outbreak discovered in December in Wuhan, central China.