THURSDAY, APRIL 18, 2024
There have been eight deaths till date in Goa, and perhaps the plasma therapy could have saved some of these lives, had the government acted in advance on this. As it is, the State will not be able to start the plasma treatment for at least another week, as the apheresis machine that has been ordered for this purpose is expected to be delivered by the end of this week, and Goa Medical College has been asked to complete the appointment, on contract basis, of an MD in Transfusion within eight day to run the apparatus.
Plasma treatment for critical COVID-19 has been attempted in various countries and India saw success in April this year when it had the first patient to recover through this treatment. That first patient, a 49-year-old male from Delhi was on ventilator support as he had developed pneumonia with Type-I respiratory failure. As he showed no signs of improvement, the family requested that plasma therapy be attempted on him and arranged a donor who had recovered from COVID-19 just a few weeks earlier, for extraction of plasma. The patient was administered the fresh plasma in a first in India as treatment for COVID-19 and was weaned off ventilator support and later discharged.
Goa, eight deaths later and three months after the country’s first success, is beginning to look at plasma treatment for COVID for critical patients. Though late, it is a positive sign but for it to work not only should the technical staff to extract the plasma be in place, but there have to be recovered COVID-19 patients who will have to come forward to donate their plasma. As mentioned, the government will call on people to willing come forward as donors. The good news is that 400 ml of plasma can be donated by a single donor, which can save two lives, as 200ml is reported to be sufficient for a patient’s treatment. The State government is, however, ambitious enough to want to store 2000 packets of plasma, for which it will require a large number of donors.
While there have been successes from the plasma therapy, the research in this area is still very limited to guarantee recovery, but when hope is low, any attempt is grasped at. Studies have shown that the antibody-laden plasma from recovered patients could work better in an infected patient, only if the donor has recovered recently from COVID-19. Research has shown that plasma extracted from persons who had recovered a couple of months earlier did not act as quickly as that extracted from a person who had recovered just two or three weeks earlier. The conclusion drawn from these studies is that the antibodies could decline after a certain period, so the donor should possibly be a person who has very recently recovered from COVID-19.
While, Goa puts in some faith in plasma treatment of critical COVID-19 patients, the number of confirmed cases keeps rising and new villages are making it to the daily bulletin released by the Health Department. The announcement of plasma treatment came on the day the State saw its biggest spike in cases, with 136 new cases detected in just one day, and the total cases crossing the 2000 figure. While there has been no more deaths in the State the big question that many people will be wondering is whether plasma treatment for COVID will make a difference between life and death. The hopes of many will rest on that.
