  We study particle transport through a chain of coupled sites connected to
free-fermion reservoirs at both ends, subjected to a local particle loss. The
transport is characterized by calculating the conductance and particle density
in the steady state using the Keldysh formalism for open quantum systems.
Besides a reduction of conductance, we find that transport can remain (almost)
unaffected by the loss for certain values of the chemical potential in the
lattice. We show that this "protected" transport results from the spatial
symmetry of single-particle eigenstates. At a finite voltage, the density
profile develops a drop at the lossy site, connected to the onset of
non-ballistic transport.
