- Hsu, Jeffrey J;
- Al‐Saffar, Farah;
- Ardehali, Reza;
- Baas, Arnold S;
- Carlson, Margrit;
- Cruz, Daniel;
- Deng, Mario;
- Fan, Ashley;
- Fraschilla, Stephanie;
- Gaynor, Pryce;
- Kamath, Megan;
- Kubak, Bernard M;
- Schaenman, Joanna;
- Stimpson, Emily;
- Vucicevic, Darko;
- Ardehali, Abbas;
- Nsair, Ali
The infectious disease coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020. The impact of COVID-19 on solid organ transplantations, including heart transplantation, is currently unclear. Many transplant programs have been forced to swiftly re-evaluate and adapt their practices, leading to a marked decrease in transplants performed. This trend has been due to various factors, including increased donor COVID-19 screening scrutiny and recipient waiting list management in anticipation of COVID-19 critical care surge capacity planning. In the face of these unknown variables, determining when and how to proceed with transplantation in our population of patients with end-stage cardiomyopathies is challenging. Here, we describe our center's experience with orthotopic heart transplantation (OHT) in one of the country's pandemic epicenters, where we performed eight OHTs in the first 2 months after community spread began in late February 2020.