Please let your citizens know about these heroic service opportunities.
First, anyone who has recovered from the virus, who has been symptom-free for at least 14 days, and who is otherwise able to donate blood, could be eligible to save lives by donating their convalescent plasma.
Convalescent plasma is the liquid part of blood that is collected from patients who have recovered from the novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19, caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2. COVID-19 patients develop antibodies in the blood against the virus. Antibodies are proteins that might help fight the infection. Convalescent plasma is being investigated for the treatment of COVID-19. There is no approved treatment for this disease, but there are promising indications that COVID-19 convalescent plasma might help some patients recover.
Demand continues to exceed supply. To learn more about the process or find the nearest site, interested parties can visit:
AABB
America’s Blood Centers
American Red Cross
Blood Centers of America
CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance
National COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma Project
Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association
The Fight Is In Us
Second, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has established a new clinical trials network that aims to enroll thousands of volunteers in large-scale clinical trials testing a variety of investigational vaccines and monoclonal antibodies intended to protect people from COVID-19.
Anyone interested can learn more, and, should they decide to go forward, see if they qualify to volunteer.
The COVID-19 Prevention Trials Network (COVPN) was established by merging four existing NIAID-funded clinical trials networks: the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), based in Seattle; the HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN), based in Durham, N.C.; the Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium (IDCRC), based in Atlanta; and the AIDS Clinical Trials Group, based in Los Angeles. Those individual networks will continue to perform clinical trials for HIV vaccine and prevention and other infectious diseases in addition to their new COVID roles.