Successful Treatment of Convalescent Plasma Therapy in Three Patients With Severe SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Fuzhou, China
Authors: Wu Di , Zhu Xiaolin , Shi Songjing , Lin Fenghui , Xie Baosong , Lai Guoxiang , Chen Lizhou 
Published: February 2021

Background Up to now, there is no specific treatment for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) yet except for general supportive care. Hence, it will be critical to find a new strategy for COVID-19. The study is to explore whether convalescent plasma transfusion may be beneficial in the treatment of severe patients with COVID-19.Methods This is a retrospective analysis of three severe patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 and admitted in Fuzhou pulmonary hospital of Fujian province from February 18th, to May 15th,who met the following criteria: (1) within 3 weeks of symptom onset；laboratory confirmed cases or who had viremia conformed by clinical experts；（2）Severe patients with rapidly progress or the early stage of critically ill patients or who required plasma therapy were comprehensively evaluated by clinical experts. The data of clinical manifestations and the progresses of disease monitored by blood-gas analysis, biochemical tests, routine examine, radiological exam were abstracted and then analysis the changes before and after convalescent plasma transfusion. Results All three patients (one male and two females; age range, 57-65years) were treated with convalescent plasma during the study. Two patients had underlying chronic diseases, including diabetes and hypertension. The most common symptoms were fever (three cases, 3/3) and cough (two cases, 2/3). All patients were treated with a combination of two antiviral drugs (lopinaviritonavir or arbidol combined with IFN-ɑ), whereas none of the patients were given glucocorticoids. Following plasma transfusion, the symptoms of the whole group improved to some degree, mainly manifested as reducing in coughing and body temperature normalized. Several parameters tended to improve as compared to pre-transfusion, including increased lymphocyte counts (0.97 × 109/L vs. 1.08 × 109/L) and decreased IL-6 (41.34 pg/ml vs. 13.83 pg/ml). The density of bilateral infiltration on CT imaging showed varying degrees of absorption within 7days. Throat swab nucleic acid test of most patients became negative for the novel coronavirus within 3 days after the transfusion. No adverse effects and severe complications were observed. Conclusions In this preliminary uncontrolled case series of 3severe patients with COVID-19, convalescent plasma could be as a promising therapy for COVID-19 without corticosteroids and no serious adverse reactions associated with the transfusion of convalescent plasma were observed, which would improve the clinical outcomes following by improvement in their clinical status. Using the convalescent plasma at the early stage(less than 10 days) of disease could be more effective. Anticoagulation is necessary for severe patients with COVID-19 given the state of hypercoagulability. However, given the small sample size and limited study design, naturally these results should be taken with a grain of salt until replicated by other further investigation in larger well-controlled trials.