Convalescent Blood Treatment for COVID-19: Are Local Donors Enough?

TL;DR

This paper reviews the potential of convalescent blood plasma as a treatment for COVID-19, emphasizing the importance of a global sampling approach over local donors for effective efficacy.

Contribution

It introduces a graph theoretical model of COVID-19 transmission dynamics highlighting the need for a distributed global sampling scheme for convalescent plasma collection.

Findings

Efficacy of CBP may depend on global sampling strategies

Model identifies evolving COVID-19 transmission hubs

Local donors alone may be insufficient for effective treatment

Abstract

COVID-19 is now a global pandemic, and an effective vaccine may be many months away. Over 100 years ago, Spanish flu fatalities were attenuated when doctors began treating patients with blood plasma donated by recovered (or convalesced) survivors. Passive immunity transfer via administration of convalesced blood product (CBP) appears to represent a readily available and promising avenue for mitigating mortalities, expediting recovery time, and even prophylaxis against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Here, we review challenges to CBP efficacy, and present a graph theoretical model of transmission dynamics that identifies evolving hubs of COVID-19 cases. Importantly, this model suggests that CBP efficacy may rest on an efficient and distributed global sampling scheme as opposed to CBP pooled from local donors alone.