Transplants under lockdown (but beginning to pick up)

Since the beginning of pandemic lockdowns, living donor kidney surgeries in the U.S. have almost ceased (partly because living donor surgeries aren't emergency surgeries, and were being cancelled with all elective surgeries as hospitals readied themselves for covid-19 patients, who materialized in large numbers in some places but not others). Deceased donor transplants have also been down, for a variety of corona-related reasons, which means that donor organs are going to waste.

Here's an aggregate graph from https://unos.org/covid/

And here's a story from Statnews.com

Transplants plummet as overwhelmed hospitals focus on the coronavirus
By ELIZABETH COONEY

"Organ transplant medicine is always a high-wire act, balancing too many people’s needs with too few matches. The coronavirus epidemic has only heightened the significant risks and hoped-for benefits of transplant surgery. Organ donations are down by a third and the health care system itself is in full-blown scarcity, triaging elective surgeries to some unknown future date so only emergency cases find their way into precious operating rooms and intensive care beds. As life-saving as they are, even many transplants are being put off.

"For people who need a transplant, their fate depends on the organ and how sick they are. Pancreas transplants are on hold indefinitely, classified as “life-enhancing,” not life-saving because patients can survive on insulin. Kidney patients who can continue to function on dialysis have been taken off waiting lists while still accruing waiting time for the day when non-urgent transplants resume. Heart patients who are not already in the hospital on mechanical heart-assist devices and who may be able to wait a few weeks will do so.
...
"Prospective transplant recipients can’t have Covid-19, either. The immune-suppression drugs they must take to prevent organ rejection would prevent them from fighting off the virus and make them super-shedders of the virus, placing those around them at hugely increased risk of being infected.

Transplant emergencies mean people who can’t wait another week or even another day. But these patients are also balancing on a knife’s edge: They have to be sick enough to be near death but well enough not to need long ICU stays in hospitals overwhelmed by coronavirus patients who need weeks on ventilators so they can breathe.

“Our ability to do a liver transplant is not always just about the [risk of Covid-19] exposure to the patient,” said David Mulligan, chief of transplantation surgery and immunology at Yale. “It’s also, do we have a bed? Do we have a ventilator to take care of the patient? Can we isolate the patient from other Covid-infected patients? Do we have enough time to do this operation, get them through it, keep them away from Covid, and then get them out of the hospital safely? That’s what we’re shooting for.”
...
"The widespread delays in testing people for the coronavirus have also meant delays in testing organs, said Gabriel Danovitch, medical director of UCLA’s kidney and pancreas transplant program. “When the virus was first detected, we didn’t have the capacity to test all potential donor organs. And a lot of organs were wasted because of concern of possible infection.”