Abstract
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease which cause by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. COVID-19 epidemic first appeared in Wuhan, China in December 2019. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and then on 11 March 2020 announced as a pandemic. Since there is no specific drug and treatment, the use of convalescent plasma (CP) may serve as an alternative treatment for patients with COVID-19. This study aims to determine the effectiveness of CP therapy in COVID-19 patients with moderate to severe pneumonia. In our trial, 186 patients were enrolled including 111: male and 75: female, age of 21-91 years, and 49 patients completed the trial. The primary outcome showed 95% (177 of 186 patients) of patients were discharged, whereas 5% died. Among the 49 patients, clinical assessment was evaluated using by Chest-X-Ray, COVID-19 antibody levels and laboratory parameters. the kinetics of anti-nucleocapsid, anti-spike and neutralizing antibody level of 49 patients were significantly increased in 3-, 7- and 14-days post-transfusions respectively. Moreover, IFN-β, IL-6, IL-10 and IFN-α have significant difference among the groups. These findings indicated that most patients with low SARS-CoV-2 antibody titers tended to higher recovery rate after receiving high antibody-titre convalescent plasma. Nevertheless, we could not conclude that outcomes were entirely due to only CP treatment.
