Introduction: Although COVID-19 pandemic has caused a significant impact worldwide, organ donation & transplantation (OD & OT) practice continuous in most of the countries. Since China launched the pilot program of voluntary deceased OD in 2010, the national organ donation & procurement system has been developing towards standardization. In this study, features of the global & national trends in OD & OT during the COVID-19 pandemic were summarized.

Method: A retrospective study using data from the global observatory on donation and transplantation (GODT) was conducted. We analyzed the collected data to obtain the results and conclusions.

Results: The summed-up characteristics covered different aspects and could be outlined as the followings: 1) The number of global OT has been increasing until the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. There were 129,681 OT performed worldwide in 2020, a decrease of 17.6% comparing to that of 2019. The percentage of China’s annual OT to the global OT number rose from 7.9% among in 2015 (10,057 cases) to 13.8% in 2020 (17,949 cases). 2) In China, joint-efforts have been made to achieve self-sufficiency of OT on the national level. The total number of OD exceed 5,000 in 2020, accounting for 14.5% of the global deceased OD. The China OD & OT program works orderly with implementation of prevention control policy under the pandemic. 3) DBD remains as the major source for OT worldwide while the number of DCD has been increasing in the recent year. With the lasting promotion of clinical practice in brain death diagnosis, the percentage of DBD in China has increased over the past five years. 4) The percentage of global living donor (LD) transplants has decreased year-on-year. With the implementation of deceased OD program in different Asian countries, living donation does not comprise the majority of organ source for OT in Asia. 5) The percentages of liver, kidney and lung transplantation in China were on the rise compared to the global total and the liver transplantation accounted for the highest proportion. 6) China’s OT activity ranks second in the world, but the PMP of deceased OD & OT is low, indicating rooms for improvement. 7) Innovative transplant approaches were explored worldwide to meet the increasing transplant demands. Efforts have been made in China to promote innovation for transplantation, examples can be seen, such as the fact that China completed ischemia-free liver/kidney/heart transplantation, and successfully performed the world's first double-lung transplant with COVID-19 patient in 2020.

Conclusion: Summary of current features in OD & OT in China and worldwide were analyzed in this study. The degree of OT program development varies across the world but all making efforts to meet the ever-changing demands for transplants. Chinese reform on OD & OT marks it one of the countries contributing to the increase of OD & OT activities worldwide but still has room for improvement in operational efficiency.