Abstract
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has affected tens of millions of people globally since it was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11 March 2020. Since its outbreak in December 2019, the ongoing coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic has led to global social, economic and healthcare crises affecting millions of people and causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. As with other fields of healthcare, the pandemic with its heavy workload imposed on hospital services and personnel significantly affected solid organ transplantation. Concerns for potential exposure to the virus and its related severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2 (SARS-CoV2) have profoundly altered the process of organ donation and recovery, acceptance of organ offers, management of potential recipients and living donors, and above all transplanted and immunosuppressed patients. All those issues required prompt implementation of new practice measures and guidelines as well as continuous adaptations to the fluid and rapidly changing situation. Herein we describe a single transplant center experience with kidney transplantation during the COVID-19 pandemic; we review the national and institutional measures and restrictions undertaken in different phases of the ongoing event as well as the outcomes.
Highlights
61 deceased-donor kidney transplants (DDKT). This is in comparison to the parallel period the previous year, from 1 March 2019 to 29 February 2020, where we performed a total of 193 kidney transplants, 124 LDKTs, and 69 DDKTs
Potential kidney donors, who completed their pre-operative evaluation, were assigned to surgery only if they had no symptoms or known contact with SARS-CoV-2 infection, as well as two negative respiratory secretions swabs tested with reverse transcriptionquantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR)
Following an activity suspension period, we resumed the kidney transplant activity owing to a strict social distancing, patient’s visitors, and COVID-19 RT-PCR testing policies
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The third wave of COVID-19 in Israel has reached its peak in January 2021 with 1433 fatalities (30% of overall Israeli COVID-19 deaths) after a third nationwide lockdown was declared on 24 December 2020 [2,3]. A systemic review and meta-analysis of COVID-19 in kidney transplant recipients were recently published by Kremer et al. The study included 5559 kidney transplant recipients with COVID-19 and found a risk of mortality of 23%, regardless of sex, age, and comorbidities [10]. Several studies analyzed the risk of severe COVID-19 and related mortality between kidney transplant recipients and non-transplant patients; those studies showed results with opposite tendencies [11,12]. As of March 2021, Israel’s outbreak has eased after hitting its peak in January this year
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