A case of COVID-19 immediately after liver transplantation: Not only bad news

Abstract

COVID-19, the illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in December 2019 in Wuhan, China and has caused more 3,3 million cases and more than 230,000 deaths throughout the world, with 25,000 of them only in Spain, where the first case was diagnosed on January 31st, 2020. As COVID-19 is a "new" disease, we still do not have data on prognosis or treatment in transplant patients or on how to manage immunosuppression in this complex scenario. We present a case of COVID-19 diagnosed during the early postoperative period in a recipient whose liver transplantation was performed on late March during the lockdown in Spain, with donor and recipient previously negative rRT-PCR to SARS-CoV-2. In the first post-operative week the patient suffered COVID-19 pneumonia that was treated with immunosuppression minimization, oral Hydroxycloroquine and Azithromycin with favorable outcome. The patient was discharged on POD 21 without complications. To date, few early post-liver transplantation SARS-CoV-2 infected recipients have been published, but only one was an early postoperative infection. In our case the outcome was favorable, even though it was an early post -liver transplantation COVID-19 in a frail patient.