The Doctors Who Bet Their Patients’ Lives on COVID-19 Test Results

When the third coronavirus surge hit the U.S. last fall, the midwestern states were among the worst affected. Thousands of people in the region were being hospitalized with the virus every day. It was at this inauspicious time that a team of transplant doctors at University Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, received a pair of healthy-seeming lungs. According to a published case report, the donor had been in an automobile accident, and died from her injuries a few days later. She’d shown no signs of being sick, according to her family, nor had she been knowingly exposed to anyone with COVID-19. A radiologist did find an abnormality in her right lung but chalked it up to damage from the accident. Meanwhile, a nasal swab, taken at the hospital, confirmed her infection status: She was negative.

The patient for whom those lungs were meant to be lifesaving—a woman with chronic obstructive lung disease—also tested negative for COVID-19, in a nasal swab taken 12 hours before her surgery. But three days later, the recipient was in severe distress: She was feverish, with plummeting blood pressure, and she experienced such difficulty breathing that she had to be placed on a ventilator. Now she tested positive for the coronavirus. (One of the transplant surgeons, too, would end up sick.)

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