A Michigan woman contracted COVID-19 and died last fall after she got a double-lung transplant from a donor who turned out to have the virus, according to a study.
The incident may be the first proven case in the U.S. in which the coronavirus was transmitted through an organ transplant, researchers say in a report published by the American Journal of Transplantation.
“We would absolutely not have used the lungs if we’d had a positive COVID test,” Dr. Daniel Kaul, director of the Transplant Infectious Disease Service at the University of Michigan Medical School and one of the co-authors of the study, told Kaiser Health News.
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All the screening that we normally do and are able to do, we did,” Kaul added.
The donor was a woman from the Upper Midwest who died after suffering from a severe brain injury in a car accident.
The recipient had chronic obstructive lung disease and was operated on at University Hospital in
