A not-for-profit blood center is working with the Florida Department of Health to find people who’ve recovered from COVID-19.
Their plasma may be able to help patients.
"The treatment is called COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma," says Susan Forbes with OneBlood, a not-for-profit blood center serving Florida and surrounding states. "It’s an experimental treatment that the FDA has given emergency permission to be used in critically ill patients with the coronavirus.”
Once donors have been identified, they’ll go to OneBlood to donate plasma, which will then be offered to hospitals to treat severely ill patients.
“People who recover from coronavirus infection have developed antibodies to the virus, and those antibodies remain in the plasma portion of their blood," Forbes says. "By transfusing the plasma that contains the antibodies into a person who’s still fighting the virus, it can provide a boost to the patient’s immune system and help them recover.”
Plasma makes up about 55 percent of human blood. Donors must meet all the usual screening criteria for blood donations as well as additional criteria provided by the FDA.
This is among several experimental treatments in the works for COVID-19.
