A Model on the Large Scale Use of Convalescent Plasma to Treat Patients with Severe Symptoms

Convalescent plasma treatment refers to the approach of infusing patients with plasma from patients who have recently recovered from the same disease. It appears to be a possible therapeutic option to treat patients suffering from severe or lethal infectious disorders, in which traditional therapies have failed to obtain any result. Plasma therapy may be one of the few options that are rapidly available during an outbreak of an emerging infectious disease. The population-wide use of it has been proposed and investigated by public health and medical authorities in many recent outbreaks such as Ebola and COVID-19. The implementation of such large-scale program requires the coordination of donor screening and selection, plasma collection and stockpiling, and treatment authorization and delivery. In this chapter, we introduce a delay differential equation system to model the treatment-donation-stockpile dynamics arising from the implementation of the population-wide plasma therapy during a disease outbreak. We show that this model can be applied to examine potential benefits and complication in the logistic realization of plasma therapy in large population settings.