The Doctors Who Bet Their Patients’ Lives on COVID-19 Test Results

May 11, 2021

(The Atlantic) – There’s one specific branch of medicine where even these modest risks of error simply cannot be abided. For the more than 107,000 Americans who are now waiting for an organ transplant—and for those who have already received an organ—the stakes of COVID-19 testing are amplified many times over. It’s easy to understand how a missed infection in a donor could lead to deadly complications for the transplantee, as in the tragedy last fall. But a false-positive result—a COVID-19 case that isn’t real or is long-recovered—may be fatal too, when it delays or prevents an organ from reaching a desperate patient. It’s hard enough for frontline doctors to interpret a surprising test result. For those who work in transplant medicine, decisions made under this uncertainty could be irreversible.