Of 240 dead people tested for coronavirus in King County, a quarter were positive

The Medical Examiner's Office has been testing the dead in funeral homes, looking for possible missed cases.

When the coronavirus outbreak became known in the Seattle area, in late February, the King County Medical Examiner's Office started reviewing death certificates of everyone who died in King County before the bodies were buried or cremated, looking for any causes of death that could be associated with Covid-19.

“If we find them on reviewing the death certificate and the death certificate says something like -- they died of respiratory failure, but there is no mention of Covid, and they weren’t tested for Covid, then we will go and test them,” said Dr. Nicole Yarid, associate medical examiner for King County.

The testing takes place at funeral homes.

More than 240 dead bodies have been tested. Of those, 58 have come back Covid-19 positive. That’s a 24 percent positive rate, and it represents about 10 percent of the total number of people who have died of Covid-19 in King County.

King County may be catching cases that others are not, since few counties have the resources to do this kind of wide-scale postmortem testing. The Medical Examiner’s Office has added staff to conduct the testing.

“We are trying to be as diligent as possible and use our resources as wisely as possible by selecting cases that might have a chance of being positive,” said Dr. Yarid.

When Covid-19 hit the state, the King County Medical Examiner’s Office also began carrying out what’s called retrospective testing on all bodies in the morgue, and on blood and tissue samples from previous autopsies. All those tests were either negative or inconclusive.

Last week, state health officials said about 3,000 people in the state had died of Covid-like diseases since the beginning of the year but had never been tested. The officials said it would be very difficult to determine how many of the 3,000 had actually died of Covid-19.