Coroner’s office taking extra precautions during pandemic

GRANT COUNTY — As with health care workers and first responders adapting to the current pandemic, the coroner’s office, which is tasked with investigating deaths that occur outside of hospitals, has had to take extra precautions against COVID-19.

“It’s a scary time, no doubt about it,” said Grant County Coroner Craig Morrison. “We do death investigations all the time, but with the COVID-19 scare, it puts our investigators in a scary atmosphere.”

To protect investigators against possible infection, the coroner’s office has made significant changes to its pre-investigation interviews to determine whether the deceased may have contracted the virus, Morrison said.

Before entering homes or places where a deceased person has been discovered, investigators are contacting anyone who may have recently seen that person and who can report whether he or she had any symptoms of COVID-19, such as a cough or fever. If those symptoms had been present, investigators don protective gear and take extra sanitation steps while transporting the body, Morrison said. But if there is any doubt, the coroner’s office leans to the side of caution.

“The ones that are the most scary for us are the ones where we don’t have anyone to interview,” Morrison said. “We haven’t had one yet, but what if we find a homeless person deceased somewhere, you can’t ask anyone if they had a fever.”

A small number, three as of Thursday afternoon, have had samples taken by the coroner’s office to test for the novel coronavirus, Morrison said, using a nasal swab that gets sent through a local hospital to a state lab.

Of the three tested thus far, no tests had come back positive, though some are still pending results, Morrison said.

The guidelines for who can get tested continue to be relatively narrow, and investigators have been cautious as to who gets tested, Morrison said, though he noted that coroner offices across the state are operating under the same guidelines.

While the novel coronavirus has necessitated a ramping up of pre-investigation interviews, the underlying protocols are nothing new, Morrison said. Death investigators regularly need to take additional precautions to prevent the spread of blood-borne or airborne pathogens, he said.

Still, the coroner’s office isn’t taking the novel coronavirus for granted.

“We only have three employees in our office,” Morrison said. “We want to be safe. We don’t want to bring this virus back to our friends or families, so we know the importance of doing a good job and staying on course.”