NEW YORK – The COVID-19 pandemic has helped revive the autopsy. When the virus first arrived in U.S. hospitals, doctors could only guess what was causing its strange constellation of symptoms: What could explain why patients were losing their sense of smell and taste, developing skin rashes, struggling to breathe and reporting memory loss on top of flu-like coughs and aches?At hospital morgues, which have been steadily losing prominence and funding over several decades, pathologists were busily dissecting the disease’s first victims — and finding some answers. “We were getting emails from clinicians, kind of desperate, asking, ‘What are you seeing?’” said NYU Langone’s Dr.