By James W. Lytle
After a banner year for organ transplantation in the United States in 2019, the success became a tattered memory by April 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit major cities in the U.S. with its full fury.
A record number of 39,178 organs were donated in 2019, including 7,397 organs from living donors, also an all-time high. After several years of adverse media and regulatory scrutiny, LiveOn NY, the organ procurement organization (OPO) that serves the Metropolitan New York City region, proudly reported that a total of 938 organs had been transplanted in 2019, another record that represented more than a fifty percent increase over the transplant total in 2015.
By late April 2020, however, organ transplantation activity in New York State had reportedly declined by ninety percent.