Transplant Patient Dies After Receiving Lungs Infected With Coronavirus

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. Kaiser Health News and NBC News reported on the case on Saturday.

Read more at NY Times.

{Matzav.com}