Thousands could have been saved during the pandemic with expanded use of convalescent plasma

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A new study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimates that thousands of lives could have been saved during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic if convalescent plasma had been used more broadly, particularly in outpatients at high risk for severe disease and in hospitalized patients during their first few days of admission.

Convalescent plasma from patients who had recovered from COVID was used starting in the early months of the pandemic at the urging of a group of physicians who cited the blood byproduct’s success as a therapy in earlier infectious disease emergencies, including the global influenza pandemic of 1918–1920, and the SARS epidemic of 2002–2004. Plasma from patients recently recovered from a pathogenic infection, such as COVID, typically contains antibodies that may block or reduce the severity of the infection in others.

Over 500,000 patients were treated with convalescent plasma in the U.S. in the first year of the pandemic. 

In their new paper, published online October 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the authors estimate that treating hospitalized COVID patients with convalescent plasma saved between 16,476 and 66,296 lives in the United States between July 2020 and March 2021. For these estimates of actual lives saved, the researchers drew from convalescent plasma weekly use data, weekly national mortality data, and convalescent mortality reduction data from meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials. 

The researchers also estimated the number of potential lives that would have been saved had convalescent plasma been more widely

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