Patients who recovered from COVID-19 begin donating plasma to help treat others
New York Blood Center chief medical and scientific officer Dr. Beth Shaz on promising new treatment for coronavirus.
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Dr. Beth Shaz, chief medical and scientific officer at the New York Blood Center, joined "The Story" Wednesday night to discuss "promising" efforts to treat coronavirus using the blood plasma of recovered patients.
"Right now we have a handful [of donors]," Shaz told host Martha MacCallum. "You have to be at least 14 days after [having] symptoms. With the first cases in the New York area [confirmed] on March 1, we are just beginning to get there."
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Prior to bringing Shaz on the show, MacCallum spotlighted a New York Post report about Long Island mother Diana Berrent, who became one of the first people in New York to donate her blood plasma for treatment efforts.
"Take my blood. Take my plasma," Berrent said in the first-person story. "Swab my nasal passage over and over again. If it can potentially save a single life it would be nothing less than a miracle.
"[The therapy] has been used in China and there's a few case areas from China where the patients got better," Shaz said. "We are still really early for the U.S., I think the first patients received it just over the weekend."
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Shaz told MacCallum that the Blood Center had been on a call with the Food and Drug Administration earlier Wednesday and reported that the feds are working hard to expand the program and help as many patients as possible.
"Hopefully within the next couple of weeks we will really be able to ramp up collections, particularly as the number of people tested has increased and the number of people recovered has increased," Shaz commented.
"We are hoping to be able to collect thousands of donors."
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