On the Sensitivity and Specificity of Postmortem Upper Respiratory Tract Testing for SARS-CoV-2.

Background: Postmortem testing can improve our understanding of the impact of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) if sufficiently sensitive and specific.

Methods: We investigated the postmortem sensitivity and specificity of reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing on upper respiratory swabs using a dataset of everyone tested for SARS-CoV-2 before and after death in England, 1 March to 29 October 2020. We analyzed sensitivity in those with a positive test before death by time to postmortem test.