Noida: With daily rise in number of critical Covid patients, Government Institute of Medical Sciences (GIMS) Greater Noida has begun facing a shortage of plasma. As against over 40 patients in ICU requiring plasma currently, there are only 11 units of the same available at the hospital.
 
Apart from that, being the only government centre here dealing in plasma treatment, the hospital is also getting daily queries from at least 10-11 private hospitals for blood plasma. This is stark recoil from the overall 606 critically ill Covid patients that were treated by GIMS through plasma therapy last year from over 400 Covid recovered donors. “We had more than 87% success rate, the maximum in Uttar Pradesh, in plasma treatment,” said Brigadier (rtd) Dr RK Gupta director GIMS.

However, with the decrease in Covid cases from January to early March, plasma treatment also took a backseat.
But now, with the rising number of cases nearly more than double in the first 13 days of April with 1,602 active cases as on Tuesday, majority are in need of plasma.

“But we are not getting donors. Requests are coming from other hospitals as well. Earlier our technicians would call the Covid recovered patients through our internal database to come and donate their blood plasma. But nowadays, senior doctors are making the calls and yet we are not getting any donors,” said Dr Shivani Kalhan professor and head department of pathology GIMS Greater Noida.

Dr Kalhan adds that many donors make excuse of being out of town or too busy, while some even ask “why have you singled only me out for the job?”

According to Dr Shalini Bahadur, in-charge plasma bank at GIMS, most of the convalescent plasma is being provided to hospitals across Greater Noida and Ghaziabad as per demands. These include Yatharth hospital and Navin hospital Greater Noida and Yashoda hospital etc. in Ghaziabad. 

“Our stock varies these days with only 3 to 4 units of each group. They keep coming and get issued on demand. We gave away a lot of our stock in January and February this year as cases were very low at that time. There has been no replacement since as donors are not coming these days,” said Dr Bahadur. 

Even as GB Nagar reported four deaths on Tuesday taking the overall death toll to six in April till now, Dr Shalini Shukla, blood bank in-charge at GIMS raised an alarm appealed to all eligible donors to come forward. 

“Anyone who is in the age group of 18-60 years, males and females with no history of pregnancy, is more than 50kg, has controlled metabolic disease (diabetes and hypertension on treatment) and have recovered from Covid-19 in last four months can donate their blood plasma to save lives,” said Dr Shukla. 

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