A Michigan transplant patient has died after receiving a pair of lungs from someone who was infected with COVID-19, the Washington Post reports.
Last fall, the woman underwent surgery for a double lung transplant. Three days after the operation, the woman developed pneumonia and began to show symptoms of coronavirus, including high fever and difficulty breathing.
It was later determined that the woman, who died of the virus three months later, developed COVID-19 from a lung transplant.
The Post reports that both the transplant recipient and the donor tested negative for the virus within 12-48 hours of surgery. The donor’s lungs showed no signs of infection, and the donor’s family said the woman had no history of travel or symptoms.
The cases were confirmed when liquid lung samples were tested before and after the operation.
Daniel Kaul, the woman’s doctor and director of the infectious disease transplant service at Michigan Medicine, said such incidents can happen, but are very rare.
“This is at least the first proven case of organ transplantation with COVID-19 in the United States,” Kaul told the Washington Post.
He published his findings not to scare people away from organ transplants, but to raise awareness of the need for strict testing, he said.
“The reason we chose to report this is that we think it’s very important for people in the transplant community to be aware of this transmission, so that we can work to have a system where [respiratory] the tract specimen is checked in all lung donors. ”