{"id":255313,"date":"2020-05-19T06:03:18","date_gmt":"2020-05-19T10:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=255313"},"modified":"2020-05-19T06:03:18","modified_gmt":"2020-05-19T10:03:18","slug":"fewer-traffic-collisions-during-shutdown-means-longer-waits-for-organ-donations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2020\/05\/19\/fewer-traffic-collisions-during-shutdown-means-longer-waits-for-organ-donations\/","title":{"rendered":"Fewer Traffic Collisions During Shutdown Means Longer Waits For Organ Donations"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The roads were deserted. No traffic. Jimenez, 30, said it is hard to admit what she thought next: No traffic meant no car accidents. And that meant she\u2019d be on the waiting list for a kidney transplant even longer. (File Photo: Stewart Edward\/Unsplash)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

On Day Two of the San Francisco Bay Area\u2019s stay-at-home orders in March, Nohemi Jimenez got into her car in San Pablo, California, waved goodbye to her 3-year-old son and drove to her regular Wednesday dialysis appointment.<\/p>\n

The roads were deserted. No traffic. Jimenez, 30, said it is hard to admit what she thought next: No traffic meant no car accidents. And that meant she\u2019d be on the waiting list for a kidney transplant even longer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to be mean, but I was like, \u2018Oh, my God. Nobody\u2019s going to die,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m not going to get my transplant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jimenez was 20 and pregnant with her first child when doctors discovered she had been born with only one kidney, and that lone kidney was failing. By age 29, doctors told her she needed a new one. It was strange and scary, she said, waiting for someone to die so she could live.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re just thinking about it,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s sitting in your mind. It just can never leave you alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deaths from accidents are the biggest source of organs for transplant, accounting for 33% of donations, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, UNOS, which manages the nation\u2019s organ transplant system.<\/p>\n

But since the coronavirus forced Californians indoors, accidents have declined. Traffic collisions and fatalities in the state dropped by half in the first three weeks of sheltering in place, according to a study<\/a> by the University of California-Davis. Drowning deaths dropped 80% in California, according to data compiled by the nonprofit Stop Drowning Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In April organ procurement organizations typically see a surge in donations related to outdoor, spring break-related activities and travel, but not this year.<\/p>\n

From March 8 to April 11, the number of organ donors who died in traffic collisions was down 23% nationwide compared with the same period last year, while donors who died in all other types of accidents were down 21%, according to data from UNOS.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpring break accidents are almost nonexistent because there\u2019s no spring break \u2014 beach accidents, motorcycle accidents, hunting accidents,\u201d said Janice Whaley, CEO of Donor Network West<\/a>, which manages organ donations for Northern California and Nevada.<\/p>\n

Doctors said they\u2019ve also noticed a decline in emergency room visits overall, not just for accidents, and this may also be limiting the supply of donor organs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere are all the people with heart attacks? Where are all the people with strokes?\u201d said George Rutherford, a professor and infectious disease physician at the University of California-San Francisco. \u201cAre those patients staying away from the ERs for fear of COVID? Clearly, the census is way down in ERs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Strokes and heart attacks are the second and third most common sources of organ donations, accounting for 27% and 20% of organs, respectively, according to UNOS.<\/p>\n

When people die from a stroke or heart attack at home instead of a hospital, their organs cannot be used for transplant because of lost blood flow. Most organ donations occur after a person suffers a near-fatal event and lifesaving measures do not work. For organs to be viable,<\/a> people must die or be declared brain-dead while on a ventilator, so blood keeps pumping to the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys.<\/p>\n

COVID Preparations Slow Transplant Pipeline<\/strong><\/p>\n

A range of other logistical complications have made transplants difficult during the coronavirus pandemic. Hospitals have had to scale back surgeries of all kinds to preserve scarce supplies of personal protective equipment and ventilators. And many haven\u2019t had the bandwidth to manage the delicate timing and complexity of organ donation, recovery, transportation and transplantation.<\/p>\n

Transplant surgeries across the country plummeted 52% from March 8 to April 11, according to UNOS data<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of things that have to happen perfectly, and now we\u2019re in an imperfect situation where we\u2019re trying to deal with so many other things,\u201d Whaley said.<\/p>\n

As medical centers braced for a wave of COVID-19 patients, they wanted to free up as many ventilators as possible. In addition to donors needing to die on ventilators to keep their organs viable, doctors often keep them on ventilators for two or three days while transplant teams and recipients are lined up. Then the recipients need to be on ventilators during surgery.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople were very antsy about having non-COVID-19 patients on ventilators, taking up space,\u201d Whaley said. \u201cThey wanted to make sure they were ready for that next patient.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many COVID patients who died offered their organs for donation, but those were declined out of concern that recipients could become infected, she said.<\/p>\n

And a shortage of coronavirus testing supplies made it difficult for transplant centers to test potential donors who later died of other causes to make sure they were not infected with the virus.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo there may have been some organ turndowns that we normally wouldn\u2019t have seen,\u201d said Dr. Chris Freise, a professor and transplant surgeon at UCSF.<\/p>\n

As a matter of policy, hospitals canceled virtually all organ transplants from living donors, where a family member or someone else donates a kidney or section of their liver.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat involves bringing two patients into the hospital \u2014 the donor and the recipient \u2014 and we certainly didn\u2019t want to put donors at any significant extra risk,\u201d Freise said. \u201cLiving-donor kidney transplant ground down to almost a complete halt in most programs across the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some hospitals began doing living donations again in early May, while donations from deceased donors started to increase slowly in mid-April.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when Jimenez got her call from Freise\u2019s team at UCSF. A condition related to Jimenez\u2019s three pregnancies made finding a donor match<\/a> for her very difficult, Freise said, \u201clike a needle in a haystack.\u201d That also put her at the top of the waiting list in case a match was found.<\/p>\n

Jimenez\u2019s phone rang at 2 a.m. on April 17. A transplant staffer told her to get to the hospital right away.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was excited,\u201d Jimenez said. \u201cBut then my mind hit me: Somebody died.\u201d<\/p>\n

All she knows is that the donor was 19 and died in an accident in Los Angeles. Jimenez wrote a letter to the donor\u2019s family.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told them that I will forever be thinking of them,\u201d she said. \u201cI will have him or her in my body for the rest of my life, and I will live for both of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jimenez has six months of recovery ahead of her. She said she\u2019s looking forward to going back to work and having more energy to play with her kids.<\/p>\n

This story is part of a reporting partnership that includes KQED<\/a>, NPR<\/a> and Kaiser Health News.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kaiser Health News<\/a> (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation<\/a> which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.<\/p>\n

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On Day Two of the San Francisco Bay Area\u2019s stay-at-home orders in March, Nohemi Jimenez got into her car in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":255314,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-255313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-lifestyle","mauthors-april-dembosky","mauthors-kqed","mauthors-kaiser-health-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255313"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":255315,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255313\/revisions\/255315"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}