First Covid fatality after a transplant

DETROIT: A woman who died after undergoing a double lung transplant at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor is the first known person to contract Covid19 from donor lungs, according to a report published in the American Journal of Transplantation.

‘‘To my knowledge, this is the first, and actually the only, documented transmission of Covid19 to a recipient’’ from donated organs, said Bruce Nicely, chief clinical officer of Gift of Life Michigan, the state’s organ and tissue recovery programme.

The case represented ‘‘the worstpossible scenario’’ to play out in the pandemic that has killed more than half a million Americans, Nicely said.

The transplant occurred in late October and the donor was from out of state.

The woman who underwent the double lung transplant had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and tested negative for coronavirus 12 hours before surgery, the case report said.

The organ donor, a woman who suffered brain death following a car accident, also had a negative test using a nasopharyngeal swab within 48 hours of when her organs were procured.

The donor’s family reported she had no known history of travel and no recent Covid19 symptoms. It was unclear whether the organ donor had exposure to a person infected with the virus.

A day after the transplant, the recipient’s heart was not pumping as well as expected, and two days after the transplant, she developed a fever, low blood pressure and respiratory distress.

Doctors collected samples of fluid from her lungs and the results were positive.

The same type of fluid from the organ donor was then tested and yielded a positive result. Soon after, a surgeon who performed the transplant surgery also tested positive for the virus.