Well the favorite activity of most New Yorkers is no longer on the schedule. Time to re-up that Netflix subscription. Playing with corpses is out until the COVID pandemic is over.

Oh, and don’t forget to wear your mask.

Due to a rise in COVID-19, the flu and RSV, @NYCHealthy recommends wearing a mask to protect yourself and others. pic.twitter.com/OdFAQXHfHR

— City of New York (@nycgov) December 14, 2022

Thanks NYT. You are such a buzzkill. Millions of Americans spend hours a day handling corpses as a fun activity, but apparently that might be unhealthy. You can get COVID from it.

For God’s sake, NYT, give it up.  This qualifies as news that is “fit to print?”

Aside from a few cannibals in the world there is literally nobody on Earth who thinks that handling corpses is without its health risks. Most of us, in fact, avoid handling corpses as a matter of course. I appreciate that some can do so without getting creeped out, but needless to say I am not in that category.

Yuck.

Like a zombie in a horror film, the coronavirus can persist in the bodies of infected patients well after death, even spreading to others, according to two startling studies.

The risk of contagion is mainly to those who handle cadavers, like pathologists, medical examiners and health care workers, and in settings like hospitals and nursing homes, where many deaths may occur.

While transmission from corpses is not likely to be a major factor in the pandemic, bereaved family members should exercise caution, experts said.

“In some countries, people who have died of Covid-19 are being left unattended or taken back to their homes,” said Hisako Saitoh, a researcher at Chiba University in Japan who published two recent studies on the phenomenon.

“Therefore, I think that it is a knowledge that the general public should be aware of,” he wrote in an email.

I’m sorry, but this is news? Somebody not only studies the phenomenon–not a shock, really, as we employ scientists to study such matters and it makes sense to know these things, I guess–but a reporter, an editor, and an online editor thought that this was important new information for the people of the world to know. It’s on the NYT front page on its website.

I, along with every other sentient being, knew to avoid corpses that might contain diseases. I’ve watched zombie flicks. I even suffered through Outbreak, a movie whose storyline is even less plausible than those zombie movies. Dustin Hoffman cured Ebola in like 10 minutes, disappointing the military guy who wanted to play with a nuke or something.

I learned my lesson from those movies. Avoid corpses and don’t nuke monkeys or something like that. Anyway, no corpses allowed.

Now I don’t blame Hisako Saitoh. I actually admire him for having the ingenuity to get the New York Times to actually publish a story on why you shouldn’t be carelessly handling corpses. Being named in a NYT story is probably a boon to his career, and his research here would not normally light the scientific world’s hair on fire out of surprise.

Grant money! Good on him. As for the NYT, you employ too many “reporters.” At least this isn’t about Trump and Russia.

I am willing to bet that most scientists working with dead people don’t actually set their sandwiches down on the bodies, as the TV coroners do. Proper hygiene and corpse handling, at least in Western countries, tend to go together.

The research has not yet been vetted for publication in a scientific journal, but outside experts said that the studies were well-done and the results compelling.

The risk of a live patient spreading the coronavirus is far greater than the potential transmission from corpses, Dr. Saitoh and other scientists emphasized.

If infection from corpses accounted for a large number of cases, “we would have noticed, right?” said Vincent Munster, a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

What, on Earth, is the NYT going on about? Even the NIAID guy sounds exasperated in his quote. You can imagine his train of thought: is random corpse-handling a problem in NYC?

Now if this were the San Francisco Chronicle I might understand. Given the increased likelihood of finding a fentanyl-created corpse on the street maybe the denizens of that city genuinely need the warning. But I was unaware that New York City is strewn with corpses to avoid. And if so, COVID is unlikely to be the greatest danger. Gunshots are more likely to be the problem.

If I ran into a corpse on the street I would certainly run the other direction. Common sense and all that.

But just in case you needed this warning: avoid playing with corpses. They could carry disease.