Amid the Coronavius pandemic, the United States, the worst affected country from the outbreak got some good news to cheer about as surgeons led by an Indian-origin doctor have given a new set of lungs to a young woman who was suffering from severe lung damage from COVID-19, a surgery believed to be the first of its kind in America since the pandemic began.

The Coronavirus patient, a woman in her 20s is the recipient of the lungs. She who would not have survived without the transplant said the Northwestern Medicine in Chicago.

She is in intensive care and recovering from the operation after being on lung and heart assistance devices for two months, The Washington Post reported.

Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut born Ankit Bharat, the doctor who performed the surgery, is the chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of Northwestern’s lung transplant programme. He said organ transplantation may become more frequent for victims of the most severe forms of Coronavirus.

“This is one of the toughest transplants I’ve done,” he said. “This was truly one of the most challenging cases.” said  Bharat.

The novel coronavirus most commonly attacks the respiratory system of the patient but the disease can also can inflict damage on kidneys, hearts, blood vessels and the neurological system.

“I certainly expect some of these patients will have such severe lung injury that they will not be able to carry on without transplant,” said Bharat, who performed the operation on Friday.

“This could serve as a lifesaving intervention,” the paper quoted him as saying.

The woman whose identity is not being revealed, was on immunosuppressant medication for a previous condition when she contracted the coronavirus, he said.

“Perhaps for that reason, the virus devastated her lungs, leaving physicians few options,” Bharat said.

She developed secondary bacterial infections that could not be controlled by antibiotics because her lungs were so badly damaged, he said.

As the woman’s lungs deteriorated, her heart also began to fail, followed by other organs that were not receiving enough oxygen.

She was placed on a mechanical ventilator to help her breathe and later an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation device, which adds oxygen to blood outside the body and helps the heart pump blood through vessels.

Bharat said that the doctors repeatedly tested fluid from her lungs to be certain she was negative for the coronavirus before operating and by that time, she was even more sick.

“The woman spent just two days on the waiting list before an appropriate brain-dead lung donor was found. Only a small percentage of donor lungs meet the standards for transplantation, and at first, the woman”s physicians were not sure these would qualify,” Bharat said.

In Austria on May 26, world’s first known lung transplant to save the life of a COVID-19 survivor was performed by surgeons on a 45-year-old woman who was suffering from the severe form of the virus.

Bharat said he and others in his field are not aware of another organ transplant of any kind in the United States involving a recipient who had contracted the coronavirus.

The United Network for Organ Sharing, a nonprofit that coordinates transplantation in the United States, has no record of an organ transplant into a COVID-19 patient as of May 29, spokeswoman Anne Paschke said.

However, hospitals have two months from the date of surgery to report a transplant to the Richmond organisation, she said.

“The median life of a double-lung transplant is about nine years before the organs must be replaced, but experts have seen transplanted lungs function much longer,” Bharat said.

“We are one of the first health systems to successfully perform a lung transplant on a patient recovering from Covid-19,  Bharat was quoted by CNN as saying.

“We want other transplant centers to know that while the transplant procedure in these patients is quite technically challenging, it can be done safely, and it offers the terminally ill COVID-19 patients another option for survival,” he added.

Globally, 7,500,777 confirmed coronavirus infections have been reported according to Johns Hopkins University data. There have been 420,993 known deaths so far. While, in US there are 2,089,701 positive cases of COVID-19, and the fatalities in America  reached 116,034.