Plasma deemed a reliable treatment
At the beginning, even Connecticut health experts compared the process of matching a donor of convalescent plasma to a COVID-19 patient to the “wild, wild west.”
As critically ill coronavirus patients — many on ventilators and near death — lay in hospital beds, family members made urgent pleas on social media and spreading the word by any means they could to find someone who had recovered from the illness to donate plasma.
But the process has since evolved and collection centers now even have enough plasma in reserve for a second or third wave of the pandemic.
“Like lots of things with COVID, this seems to be evolving,” said Daniel Cruser, chairman of the pathology and laboratory medicine service line for Nuvance Health, which includes Danbury, New Milford, Norwalk and Sharon hospitals. “I think in the beginning, everyone was scrambling to figure out what to do.”
The plasma of coronavirus survivors contains antibodies, which are believed to help fight the illness. Over the past few months, the standards and guidelines surrounding plasma donation and collection have changed dramatically, according to experts.
When health providers first began collecting convalescent plasma, COVID-19 survivors needed two negative tests for the illness before they could donate, according to Suzanne Rose, director of the office of research at Stamford Health, which pioneered the treatment in Connecticut.
At that time, she said, “it was near to impossible” to get that done, as tests were still hard to come by.
When patients were able to get tests, receiving the results could take as long as two weeks. It was frustrating, Rose said.
“There were people who were willing and wanted to donate plasma — and we needed plasma,” she said.
Since then, things have changed. To be eligible to donate, patients need a documented case of COVID-19, meaning they tested positive for the illness itself, or for its antibodies. Instead
of two negative tests, patients just need to be symptomfree for at least 14 days.
Other than that, there are certain standards donors must meet, most of them similar to what is required for blood donation. Donors must weigh at least 110 pounds and be in generally good health. They also can’t be on antibiotics or blood thinners, or have traveled to certain countries.
For instance, Rose said people who lived in Europe for at least three months between 1980 and 1996 can’t donate due to the risk of the human form of mad cow disease.
As for matching donors to patients, Cruser said the process is slightly different than other types of blood donation. Most notably, he said, Type O is not the universal donor the way it is with red blood cell donations. In this instance, he said, AB types are universal. Otherwise, he said the process of matching donors to patients is similar to other blood donations. “We test to see what type it is, and look for a match to see who can receive it,” Cruser said.
However, as standards for donation have loosened, so has the need for the product itself. Starting in April, Nuvance had three plasma collection centers — at Danbury and Norwalk hospitals and at its Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Since then, Cruser said, “we have collected enough of a reserve of plasma to prepare for a second or third wave, so we’re actually winding down our collection operations.”
The Danbury collection center has already closed and the Vassar Brothers center is expected to close this month. The Norwalk center will stay open, mainly for research purposes.
But Rose said, even as Stamford is seeing fewer patients and has less of an immediate need for plasma, more cases are expected over the summer and donations are still encouraged.
“We certainly want to have it available when we need it,” she said.