Transplant Patient Dies After Receiving Lungs Infected With Coronavirus

In what appears to be the first case of its kind, a pair of donated lungs led to Covid-19 in an organ recipient, according to doctors at the University of Michigan.

By Jacey Fortin

A woman in Michigan died 61 days after she received a pair of lungs from an organ donor who had been infected with the coronavirus, according to a case report published this month.

There was no indication that the donor, a woman fatally injured in a car accident, had Covid-19. A radiograph of her chest had seemed clear, and a nasal-swab test for the coronavirus had returned a negative result.

But the doctors who worked with the lung recipient at University Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., last fall began to question those results when their patient’s condition worsened. They concluded that the donor did indeed have Covid-19 — and that her lungs had infected not only the transplant patient, but also the surgeon.

It was the first confirmed case of a patient contracting the virus from the patient’s organ donor, according to the authors of the peer-reviewed report, which was published in The American Journal of Transplantation on Feb. 10.

“We want the transplant community to be aware that this can happen, and also that there may be things we can do to improve our success in screening patients for Covid,” said the surgeon, Dr. Jules Lin, an author of the report and the surgical director of the lung transplant program at Michigan Medicine, the health system of the University of Michigan.

The report said that medical professionals should consider testing lung donors for the coronavirus using a sample from their lower respiratory tract, which extends into the lungs — beyond the reach of a nasal swab. That kind of testing, which is invasive and not recommended for the general public, is not always available; currently, only about one-third of donated lungs are tested this way.

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