Why we’re still relying on a century-old strategy to treat COVID-19
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COVID-19 research is advancing at an unprecedented speed, but one strategy doctors are leaning on to treat COVID-19 patients looks more antiquated than innovative. In hospitals around the United States, caregivers are resorting to using century-old convalescent plasma therapy — siphoning blood from survivors and reinfusing it into the sick.
That’s because the hundreds of research papers published in the past few months and the record-setting leaps in vaccine development haven’t been fast enough to keep up with the blistering speed of the ongoing pandemic. People are sick and dying now, which is why doctors are falling back on plasma therapy as one stopgap measure that they hope can help in the lag time before other treatments come...