Effectiveness and feasibility of convalescent blood transfusion to reduce COVID-19 fatality ratio
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As of April 7th 2020, COVID-19 has spread to 209 countries with more than 1,400,000 cases and more than 80,000 deaths. The rapidly increasing number of patients mandates the consideration of potential treatments for patients under severe and critical conditions. Convalescent plasma (CP) treatment refers to the approach of infusing patients with plasma from recently recovered patients. CP appears to be a possible therapeutic option to manage patients suffering from severe or even lethal infectious disorders, in which "traditional therapies" have failed to obtain any result. In the present study, we develop a mathematical model that couples the disease transmission compartmental system with treatment-donation-stockpile dynamics for an optimal implementation of CP therapy to examine potential benefits and complications in the logistic realization of this therapy in a large-scale population. We parameterize the model with COVID-19 epidemics in Italy, and conduct scenario analyses to compare outcomes of population-wide CP therapy and to examine the maximum number of CP donation processions per day under various levels of the effectiveness of the intervention measures implemented in the country. Under the assumption that the fatality ratio of CP is 10% and the population-wide CP was initiated on March 31st 2020, we show that an early start of the population-wide CP therapy can save as many as 6; 451 lives (ranging from 3; 074 to 26; 500 depending on containment effectiveness), while the demand of apheresis use is manageable in all scenarios: the maximum demand is 485 per day (ranging from 455 to 934 depending on containment effectiveness). Given that Italy has 61 centers with apheresis this maximum demand level corresponds to a daily average of 8 processions of CP donation (ranging from 7:5 to 15 depending on containment effectiveness) being performed by each center.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".