BadMoonRisin said:
SoulSlaveAG2005 said:
Give blood where ever you are.
Hospitals and patients care hasn't stopped, and most centers are shipping blood at or close to 100% averages.
However, collection opportunities are struggling due to school lockdowns, work from home etc.
Even being listed as an essential medical service, mobile blood drives are down nearly 60% in collection.
Scary times ahead at this pace going into the holidays for patient care.
Most transfusions are for cancer patients, heart surgeries, mothers in labor and every day occurrences that don't make the 6pm news.
And if you pop hot for antibodies. Donate plasma to your local blood center as convalescent plasma. Don't go sell it to the plasma center that then sells it to pharmaceutical companies. If you get paid, then it doesn't go to a patient for transfusion at a hospital.
Correct me if I am misunderstanding, but didnt you say in the past that you needed a positive COVID19 test to be able to donate convalescent plasma? Antibodies werent enough?
I think I remember that, but it might have been a month or two ago, and I know things might have been changed by now.
Correct. Early on in order to qualify to donate convalescent plasma we needed a copy of a PCR or diagnostic test due to the infancy of the antibody testing.
Now that we have both qualitative and quantitative tests that we have a strong confidence in reliability and accuracy on we not linger require a diagnostic test at all.
We are doing the testing on the back end, and if it pops positive, we reflect back to a quantitative test and label it either high/low titer convalescent plasma.