A Michigan transplant patient died after receiving a pair of lungs from someone who was infected with COVID-19, reports the Washington Post.
Last fall, the woman underwent surgery for a double lung transplant. Three days after the surgery, the woman developed pneumonia and started showing symptoms of the 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 her lung transplant.
The Post reports that both the transplant recipient and the donor tested negative for the virus 12-48 hours after surgery. The donor’s lungs showed no sign of infection and the donor’s family said the woman had no history of travel or symptoms.
The cases were confirmed when fluid samples from the lungs taken before and after surgery were tested.
Daniel Kaul, the woman’s doctor and director of the Michigan Medicine transplant infectious disease service, said incidents like this can happen, but they are very rare.
“This is at least the first proven case of transmission of COVID-19 via organ transplantation in the United States,” Kaul told The Washington Post.
He published his findings not to scare people from getting organ transplants, but to raise awareness of the need for rigorous testing, he said.
“The reason we chose to report this is that we think it is really important that people in the transplant community are aware of this transmission so that we can work to have a lower system [respiratory] tract specimens are checked in all lung donors. ”