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Blood Plasma From Survivors Will Be Given to Coronavirus Patients:
Can blood from coronavirus survivors help other people fight the illness? Doctors in New York will soon be testing the idea in hospitalized patients who are seriously ill.
Blood from people who have recovered can be a rich source of antibodies, proteins made by the immune system to attack the virus. The part of the blood that contains antibodies, so-called convalescent plasma, has been used for decades to treat infectious diseases, including Ebola and influenza.
"It's kind of difficult scientifically to know how valuable it is in any disease until you try," said Dr. David L. Reich, president and chief operating officer of the Mount Sinai Hospital, which will be using the treatment. "It's not exactly a shot in the dark, but it's not tried and true."
Dr. Reich said it would be tried as a treatment for hospitalized patients who had a moderate form of the disease and had trouble breathing, but not for those who are in advanced stages of the disease.
"The idea is to get to the right patients at the right time," he said. "But it's experimental."
Researchers at Mount Sinai were among the first in the United States to develop a test that can detect antibodies in recovering patients, an essential part of this treatment strategy.
On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration gave permission for the plasma to be used experimentally on an emergency basis to treat coronavirus patients, and hospitals in New York quickly began asking to participate, said Dr. Bruce Sachais, chief medical officer of the New York Blood Center, which will collect, test and distribute the plasma.
"Our main focus is, how do we implement this quickly to help the hospitals get product to their patients," Dr. Sachais said. "We have blood centers in New England, Delaware and the Midwest, so we can do the same thing in other regions. We're working with other blood centers and hospitals that may collect their own blood and want to do this. We may not be able to collect enough plasma in New York to help the entire country, so we want to share with other centers to help them."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @09:35PM (4 children)
I was going to mod you up as funny, but I realized, that since there are people actually so seriously fucked up that they believe all that--including some here on Soylent News--that there is an actual possibility (probably not, but it's a possibility) that you are being serious.
Poe's Law...
(Score: 3, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday March 29 2020, @10:47PM
I modded it funny for you.
The clue for me was the phrase "these guys" on the link the League of Women voters site.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Mykl on Sunday March 29 2020, @11:36PM
Modding stuff like this as funny is one of the best ways to make sure that people don't take this sort of thing seriously. It's also got the added benefit of ridiculing someone if they actually believe it.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @11:40PM
Use the links, Luke. [and your brain]
The Internet will be with you. Always.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @12:42AM
They made it clear it was satire by linking to announcements about clinical trials while the text denied they were taking place. I don't think too many people on SN actually believe those things. However, there are trolls who will post such things, probably because they know they'll get over the top reactions from a few users here. But the grandparent is definitely satire, not trolling.
And it's good news that, at least for today, science seems to have won out over the impulses of President Trump. Extending the social distancing guidelines through the end of April is a good move. Projecting that the economy could start to reopen around the end of May is far more consistent with observations and modeling of the disease.
By the way, there are some interesting tools to predict the spread of the coronavirus and general characteristics about how contagious diseases spread. One uses a Kalman filter to predict trends in the virus spread [github.com] and make projections for a number of areas [medium.com]. And there are models like the SIR model [youtube.com] and some very interesting simulations testing the effectiveness of various control measures [youtube.com].