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Abstract In the Spring of 2020, the United States of America (USA) deployed COVID-19 convalescent plasma (CCP) to treat hospitalized patients. Over 500,000 patients were treated with CCP during the first year of the pandemic. In this study, estimated the number of actual inpatient lives saved by CCP treatment in the USA based upon CCP weekly use, weekly national mortality data, and CCP mortality reduction data from meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials and real-world data. We also estimate the potential number of lives saved if CCP had been deployed for 100% of hospitalized patients or used in 15% to 75% of outpatients. Depending on the assumptions modeled in stratified analyses, CCP was estimated to have saved between 16,476 and 66,296 lives. The CCP ideal use might have saved as many as 234.869 lives while preventing 1,136,133 hospitalizations. CCP deployment was a successful strategy for ameliorating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA. This experience has important implications for convalescent plasma used in future infectious disease emergencies. Significance statement When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, the population lacked immunity, no validated therapies were available, and mortality was high. COVID-19 convalescent plasma (CCP) was authorized in the United States for treatment of hospitalized patients based on historical evidence of convalescent plasma (CP) efficacy and findings from a nationwide registry suggesting that it reduced mortality. However, this decision was controversial because it was not based on evidence from randomized controlled clinical trials. In this study, we leveraged CCP use and mortality data combined with CCP efficacy data to show that CCP reduced mortality and saved tens of thousands of lives the first year of the pandemic. This provides a powerful basis to consider CP deployment in future infectious disease emergencies.
Dragotakes et al. (Sat,) studied this question.