Many more lives could have been saved with convalescent COVID-19 plasma

Thousands more U.S. lives could have been saved with the use of COVID-19 convalescent plasma (CCP), according to a study published online Oct. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Quigly Dragotakes, Ph.D., from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, and colleagues conducted meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials and real-world data to estimate the number of actual inpatient lives saved by CCP treatment in the United States based on CCP weekly use, weekly mortality data, and CCP mortality reduction data. The potential number of lives saved if CCP had been deployed for 100 percent of hospitalized patients or used in 15 to 75 percent of outpatients was also estimated.

The researchers estimated that CCP would have saved between 16,476 and 66,296 lives, depending on the assumptions modeled in a stratified analysis. As many as 234,869 lives could have been saved and 1,136,133 hospitalizations prevented with ideal CCP use.

“These data support the use of convalescent plasma in future infectious disease outbreaks for which validated therapies are not available. Our results suggest that had CCP use been encouraged and had its availability been prioritized by medical and governmental authorities, more lives would have been saved,” the authors write.

Several authors were co-authors in a review/position paper dealing with the use of CCP published in 2021.

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