Rajasthan conducts successful plasma therapy on three COVID-19 patients

Yash Goyal

Our Correspondent

Jaipur, June 26

Rajasthan has successfully treated three COVID-19 patients by plasma therapy at SMS Hospital and College, Jaipur.

“So far, we have conducted three successful COVID plasma therapies. All three patients are showing improvement in their clinical state, oxygen saturation and d-dimer levels,” Dr Sudhir Bhandari, principal and controller, SMS Medical College, said on Friday.

“We have included these patients with progressive disease as shown by clinical findings and HRCT chest scoring system. All this is being done as per the protocol of the ICMR and with the permission of the DCGI. The dose required is 200 ml of plasma on two consecutive days,” Dr Bhandari, who led a team of doctors, claimed.

SMS hospital was the first after the same team of doctors recovered an Italian tourist followed by many others in the beginning phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. The doctors used mix medicines that proved to be successful in recovering the patients, he recalled.

As per the ICMR protocol and only for patients who qualify for the treatment, the donors of plasma are the patients who have recovered after 21 to 28 days of their illness.

Repeated RT-PCR testing was done on them and when found negative, they were found to be suitable donors. Antibody detection rapid test was also done that showed a positive response, meaning that the protective antibodies have formed in the recovered patients, following which their plasma was obtained for donation, which was then infused into the blood-group matched recipients suffering from active infection.

The plasma is obtained through an online separation technique in which RBCs are transfused back to the donor, Dr Bhandari informed.

He further added that convalescent plasma or immune globulins had been used as an adjunct therapy to improve the survival rate of patients with SARS or COVID-19, whose condition continued to deteriorate despite treatment with so-far known modalities.

Meanwhile, Medical and Health Minister Raghu Sharma maintained that the recovery rate of COVID-19 patients in the state has touched a new mark of 79 per cent as 12,935 patients of the total 16,386 cases have recovered.