Surgeons have performed a double lung transplant on a Covid-19 patient in Chicago, the hospital that carried out the procedure said today, in what is thought to be a first in the United States.
The patient is a young Hispanic woman in her twenties, and had spent six weeks on a life support machine in the intensive care unit of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.
By early June, her lungs had become so badly damaged that it was decided that a transplant was her only option. "A lung transplant was her only chance for survival," said Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of the Northwestern Medicine Lung Transplant Program.