Online, UMass Memorial has put out a call for people local to Central Massachusetts who are fully recovered from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. The health care system wants those people to sign up to donate plasma to help current coronavirus patients.
“People who have fully recovered from COVID-19 have antibodies in their plasma that can attack the virus,” the website reads. “This convalescent plasma is being evaluated as treatment for patients with serious or immediately life-threatening COVID-19 infections, or those judged by a healthcare provider to be at high risk of progression to severe or life-threatening disease.”
The system wants to create a registry of potential donors and has already started plasma treatment.
UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester has reported success with its first plasma treatment.
“UMass Memorial Medical Center has completed its first dosing of a critically ill COVID-19 patient with plasma, and the results are encouraging! After hours of transfusion the patient has dramatically improved overall and is now starting to wean off of the ventilator after having required near maximal settings to oxygenate him prior to the plasma transfusion,” the hospital wrote in a news release.
Last week, the FDA encouraged recovered coronavirus patients to donate plasma to help other people fight the virus.
“Convalescent plasma is an antibody-rich product made from blood donated by people who have recovered from the disease caused by the virus. Prior experience with respiratory viruses and limited data that have emerged from China suggest that convalescent plasma has the potential to lessen the severity or shorten the length of illness caused by COVID-19,” the FDA wrote in a news release. “It is important that we evaluate this potential therapy in the context of clinical trials, through expanded access, as well as facilitate emergency access for individual patients, as appropriate.”
UMass Memorial Health Care CEO Dr. Eric Dickson said Tuesday that the hospital system had seen a 30% increase in the number of patients needing a ventilator since Friday, amid a surge that is currently hitting Central Massachusetts hard.
Across the state, 1,961 residents have died from illness related to coronavirus and at least 41,199 have tested positive for the virus.
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