First plasma therapy success: A 49-year-old man after being treated with plasma therapy has shown improvement. He has now fully recovered and was discharged, the hospital said, adding that he will stay at home for another two weeks.
The patient(49-year-old man, who recovered) had tested positive for COVID-19 on April 4 and was admitted to Max Hospital, Saket, it said in a statement.
As his condition deteriorated, he was put on ventilator support on April 8, the hospital added.
When the patient showed no signs of improvement, his family requested for administration of plasma therapy on compassionate grounds, it said, adding that the family arranged a donor for extracting plasma.
The patient was administered fresh plasma as a treatment modality as a side-line to standard treatment protocols on the night of April 14, the statement said.
Subsequently, the patient showed improvement and by the fourth day, was weaned off ventilator support and continued on supplementary oxygen. He was shifted to a room with round-the-clock monitoring on Monday after testing negative twice within 24 hours.
Group medical director of Max Healthcare and senior director of the Institute of Internal Medicine Dr. Sandeep Budhiraja said, “We can say that plasma therapy could have worked as a catalyst in speeding up his recovery. We cannot attribute 100 percent recovery to plasma therapy only, as there are multiple factors which carved his path to recovery.”
The process of donating plasma to treat COVID-19 is not very complex and can be done in just two hours, a donor in Delhi has told NDTV. One of the most discussed methods of treatment of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus is plasma therapy, which involves the transfusion of plasma from a convalescent coronavirus patient to a critical patient. The blood of a recovering patient is rich in antibodies produced by the body to fight the virus, which is expected to help the critical patient recover.
Plasma therapy trials are going on in the national capital, and Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has said they are seeing encouraging results.
