FWIW, it seems at least plausible to me that a recovered patient who was treated with serum may not generate as many protective antibodies as a naturally recovered patient. For example, Rh antibodies are used during pregnancy specifically to prevent an immune response. I don’t know if this would apply to COVID-19 or if giving serum only after symptoms become severe would prevent this outcome.
Exponential growth messes everything up, basically. All our intuition about how things work tends to be wrong in subtle ways.
[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...
I’m curious /excited to rare how this dynamic changes once we get serological tests online. Maybe all of the mild cases amongst youth can give enough serum to treat the harder hit individuals.
Here’s a recent discussion about serum:
https://www.globalhealthnow.org/2020-03/covid-19s-stop-gap-s...
And the linked study:
And many more reasons...
1. Where are the high costs coming from? Distribution? Storage? People? Most of these seem shared for other drugs.
2. Blood transfusion seems to be one of the most common treatments there is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_transfusion#Frequency_of...). Safety concerns seem to stem from so far unknown pathogens that are not tested for in the blood of donors.
3. Production facilities are every hospital. Nothing needs to be produced or what do you refer to?
Right now, chloroquine is cheap. I suspect that will change. As for plasma yes, every step from collection to administration is expensive if you want to keep with the current safety level. And other people need plasma too...
Plasma toxicity worries currently comes more from transfusion-related reactions than from infection.
Hospitals have very limited capacity in term of production. Just starting with the fact that you'd have to find enough volunteers in the first place, but even so a hospital is not a factory.
It’s helpful in the short term, but not effective for longer than a few weeks apparently. Also there may be scaling issues?
> It’s not a vaccine. Think about it as the administration of a protein, it’s a liquid that is given to people that gives them immunity.
> Right. Because the vaccine would provoke the recipient’s antibodies. You'll have the antibodies, but they won't be your antibodies—though it'll do the same thing.
A vaccine triggers an active immune response. That includes the differentiation of aptly-called "memory" B cells. Those can lie dormant for decades and spring into action when needed.