Hotspot Hyderabad's Gandhi Hospital turns to plasma trials against Covid-19

Hyderabad: Greater Hyderabad continued to disgorge coronavirus infections n Telangana, accounting for 26 of the 33 cases reported Sunday. Just as worrying, the rest of the cases are migrant workers who had arrived in the state over the past couple of days.

Even as the upward trend of cases in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) area has not shown any sign of abating, Telangana is expected to host a second special team from the centra government who will look at the state's handling of the pandemic.

Hyderabad is the main worry for Telangana: More than half of the total of 1,196 Covid-19 cases have come from within the Greater Hyderabad area.

On Sunday, the health department said there were no discharges of patients and that the number of active cases currently undergoing treatment was 415.

The central government's decision to send a second special team to the state underscores the concern in the Union Ministry of Health over how Covid-19 has been handled here.

Meanwhile, it was learnt that Gandhi General Hospital (GGH) is preparing to conduct plasma trials to treat select Covid-19 patients at the hospital. Plasma transfusion of antigens from a recovered patient into a suffering patient is a potential but unvalidated cure that is being tried out in several states in India. Recently the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) approved human trials of that line of treatment.

A little more than two dozen patients who have recovered and were discharged are learnt to have agreed to donate blood for these trials. Their plasma containing antibodies will be infused into patients to bolster his or her immunity and ability to fight the virus.