America Needs Plasma From COVID-19 Survivors Now
Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.
Tatiana Prowell knew it was a long shot, but she didn’t know what else to do. Her brother-in-law’s father, the man she knew affectionately as “Papa Doc,” was in the ICU with COVID-19, and things were not looking good. “HELP!,” she tweeted late on Wednesday night: She needed to find someone who had recovered from COVID-19, and then ask for their blood.
The day before Prowell tweeted her plea, the doctors to use plasma, the yellow fluid in which blood cells are suspended, as a Hail Mary to treat very ill COVID-19 patients. The idea of using plasma from survivors, also known as convalescent-plasma. Doctors have transfused the blood of recovered patients into those still sick with the 1918 flu, measles, polio, chickenpox, SARS, and Ebola—to varying degrees of success. Given the dearth of treatments for COVID-19, convalescent plasma has gained new prominence. The blood of survivors, the thinking goes, contains proteins called antibodies that can neutralize the coronavirus. of COVID-19 patients in China show some promise. But the first hurdle is finding the recovered patients who can give plasma.
