PLASMA THERAPY SILVER BULLET OR NOT?

Leave, for a moment, those telescopic shots—those world maps filled with red dots, the Covid Tracker popups spinning and dancing on your screen.

- Preetha Nair

Come to a close-up. A place where death is intimate, proximate…and the walls are white with fear. Where the littlest medical decision can mark a before-and-after in your life…can change whether the one who gave birth to you lives or not. Krishna, the daughter of 67-year-old Tushar Mehta*, was there a handful of weeks ago. Imagine the scene. Mehta is losing his battle to the deadly pandemic in a private hospital in Delhi. His daughter is making frantic calls to her acquaintances to make arrangements to shift him to a government hospital. Krishna is holding on to a hope, an idea. The government hospital offers one last avenue to life: it’s authorised to conduct Convalescent Plasma Therapy. Infusing antibodies harvested from a survivor’s blood… that could give her father a fighting chance.