Transplant centers are adding organs from COVID-positive donors to supply

By LISA EISENHAUER

Dr. John A. Goss admits to having been a bit tense back in late 2021 when Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston decided to start using some organs from COVID-positive cadaver donors for transplants.

Goss is medical director of transplantation at Baylor St. Luke’s, the site of the nation’s first successful heart transplant. Goss is also a professor and chief of the division of abdominal transplantation at Baylor College of Medicine. In 26 years, he’s performed more than 2,000 transplants, most of them at Baylor St. Luke’s. The hospital is part of St. Luke’s Health, a system whose parent is CommonSpirit Health.

Once the medical community figured out how to check the spread of COVID through infection control measures and vaccination, Goss says he and his colleagues at Baylor St. Luke’s decided the need for organs outweighed any potential risks from transplanting organs from deceased donors who had tested positive for COVID but whose deaths were unrelated to the virus.

Since that decision was made in November 2021 and through mid-January, the medical center had transplanted more than two dozen organs — 20 livers, six kidneys and two hearts — from COVID-positive cadavers with no evidence of COVID