A COVID-19 treatment shows promise — and you might be able to help fellow Texans
We all eagerly await the day an effective coronavirus vaccine is created and made widely available. It’s the one thing that will free us from the fear and uncertainty over how the pandemic will play out.
In the meantime, though, advances in treatment of the virus are worth watching, too. The disease is still dreadfully serious. But doctors are learning more about how to treat patients with COVID-19 and prevent deaths. We’ve stepped away from the nightmare scenario medical and political leaders feared in the spring, when we were nervously counting available ventilators.
And one promising treatment, blood plasma, involves recovered COVID-19 patients helping others. The treatment is still unproven by rigorous scientific studies, but enough doctors are seeing success that public health experts are hopeful it will make a difference.
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“Doctors have been using it and it seems to work, and it makes sense to us that it works,” said Dr. Laurie Sutor, vice president of medical and technical services for Carter BloodCare.
It involves taking plasma, the liquid part of blood, from someone who has recovered from COVID-19 and transfusing it into another patient. If enough antibodies against the virus are present, they can fight it while the patient’s own immune system catches up.
“A person who’s fighting the virus will have an already-formed army of immune particles to speed their recovery,” Sutor said.
The blood bank is urging people who have defeated the virus to donate plasma. There are important criteria to meet: Donors must have had a positive test, shown symptoms of infection and be at least 14 days clear of those symptoms. And they must meet standard requirements for donating blood.
“It’s been highly sought after in our communities, widely used at a large number of our hospitals,” Sutor said. “So, we need the donors.”
Potential donors should first register on Carter’s website. Ideally, donors should give blood within a month or two of their infection, so antibodies are still highly present. But the process is the same as any other blood donation.
Other treatments discovered over the months of the pandemic have helped, too. One is as simple as having patients lie prone — on their stomach or sides — to promote higher oxygen levels in the blood. Some drugs are proving helpful.
In Tarrant County, the virus situation, while far from ideal, is improving some. Case counts remain too high but are leveling off from the worst of the summer. And there’s good news on hospitalizations, which have dipped to the lowest level in about six weeks.
But it’s far too soon to let our guard down. It’s troubling that fewer coronavirus tests are being conducted in Texas in recent days. And public-health officials are alarmed at the state’s high rate of positive tests.
Life can’t grind to a halt until a reliable coronavirus vaccine is developed. So the right mix of testing and treatment can help guide decisions and improve the COVID-19 situation until that day arrives.
And as the disease spreads and more people recover, they can make a real difference in the community by donating their blood. We urge those who have beaten the coronavirus to help others do the same.