On the last days of Tony Giamei’s life, his fiancee Christy McDonald was on Facebook posting desperate pleas for help.
“The virus is attacking his lungs [and] kidneys and he is still not getting the oxygen his body needs. We are fighting to get him the convalescent plasma,” McDonald’s April 4 post read.
She was referring to an experimental procedure used at some hospitals called plasmapheresis, where antibodies from people who recover from COVID-19 are transferred into critically ill patients in the hope that it will neutralize the virus.
Giamei, 60, had been on a ventilator with COVID-19 for nearly two weeks at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx and was steadily declining after trying two different drug trials, including hydroxychloroquine.
McDonald, 40, had already recovered from the virus and offered her own plasma to his doctors but they said they weren’t participating in the trial, and even if they were, there wasn’t enough evidence to prove it would help.
On Tuesday morning, she was en route to Mount Sinai Hospital for an appointment to have her blood tested for the coveted antibodies when she got the news Giamei had died.
“I’m completely devastated,” McDonald, who lives in the Bronx, told The Post. “But I am going to reschedule that appointment and I am going to donate to any possible hospital that I can in hopes that this does save somebody else’s loved one.”
McDonald is one of thousands of COVID-19 survivors-turned-heroes across the country who are helping scientists find a cure for the pandemic by donating their plasma and participating in research studies.
They call themselves the “Survivor Corps” and in a socially-distanced world, their meeting ground is a Facebook group where lists of plasma donation programs and research studies are regularly published and updated.
“I decided to create the Survivor Corps to bring together all of this, all of these survivors in one place. And we are tracking every study that’s going on around the country,” said the group’s founder Diana Berrent, a Long Island mom who chronicled her own coronavirus journey to The Post with daily diary entries.
Through the budding grassroots network, that’s now grown to nearly 30,000 people, Berrent believes they can change the world.
“So many of the answers to this virus are in the bodies of the survivors,” Berrent said, adding one plasma donation can be used on at least three patients.
“We as a collective community can really turn the tide of this pandemic.”
Mount Sinai Hospital was one of the first hospitals nationwide to start a plasmapheresis program back on March 24 after one of its microbiologists came up with a test for the virus antibodies and saw similar programs in China were successful.
“Treating people with plasma is not a new thing. It has been used in viruses in the past, like for a hundred years. The idea is that we take somebody who’s fully recovered, whose body has fought off the infection by making antibodies. Antibodies live in plasma in the blood,” explained Dr. Ania Wajnberg, who’s running the hospital’s plasma donation program.
“So presumably, if we take the antibodies in the plasma from somebody who has recovered, we can give them to somebody who’s severely ill, and try to kind of jumpstart their body to be able to fight off the infection.”
The Food and Drug Administration approved the treatment on an emergency basis and the hospital has tried the procedure on more than 20 “severely ill” patients, Wajnberg said.
Mount Sinai wouldn’t comment on how its patients are doing because it’s “too early” to tell — though one Maryland hospital tweeted earlier this month that five patients who received plasma had improved.
The program would be impossible without COVID-19 survivors willing to donate.
“They are having a potentially direct impact to help another sick person,” Wajnberg said. “Also, they’re helping us understand so much about the body’s response to this disease, and what potential treatment options and then further down the line, how immunity can help us reopen our society and get people back to work.”
So far, more than 22,000 survivors have answered Mount Sinai’s calls for donations and around 2,500 have been tested to see if they have the antibodies. Wajnberg and her team have identified over 130 donors and that number is growing “more and more everyday.”
Jeffrey Yonkers, a 50-year-old CPA from Long Island, is one of those donors.
“I am super excited,” Yonkers told The Post after he found out he was cleared for plasma donation at Mount Sinai. “I could cry.”
The family-man accountant heard about the program through media reports and felt compelled to help after beating the bug.
He went to Mount Sinai to have his blood tested and has now been cleared to donate plasma through the New York Blood Center. He’ll be screened and then hooked up to an IV for about an hour and a half so doctors can separate his red blood cells from the yellowish plasma fluid.
“God forbid, it was my wife that needed it. Or my family member,” Yonkers, who has an asthmatic son, said by phone.
“I always feel like I’ve been fortunate in life. So I try to give back.”
Jane Grauer, 62, and her husband Josh Grauer were part of the original cluster of coronavirus cases that sprouted in Westchester County after attending a service at the Young Israel of New Rochelle synagogue.
She battled the virus for nearly three weeks and said the experience was “like having the flu on steroids times infinity.”
For her, the hardest part came when she finally took a shower after weeks of baths.
“I couldn’t lift my arms to shampoo my hair, and I started to cry. That was like my lowest moment,” Grauer, a kindergarten teacher, recalled.
“And then I’m like, ‘well shut up’ you know, ‘you’re alive.’”
It’s that attitude that compelled her to sign up for plasma donations after she finally tested negative for the virus on March 30.
“I didn’t die and I’m so grateful to be alive. And I’m so grateful that my husband is alive. It’s incumbent on us to help other people who might literally have their lives saved,” Grauer said.
She’s been cleared to donate plasma through Montefiore Medical Center and is in the process of setting up an appointment now.
Shirley, Long Island resident Debra Tavarone, 55, lost her brother-in-law to COVID-19 on March 16 and contracted the bug while treating her mother and father-in-laws, who’d also caught the virus.
“It literally took my breath away,” Tavarone told The Post. “I think I had every symptom there could have possibly been except for, you know, dying. It was pretty bad.”
When she heard about the plasma program, she knew she had to sign up.
“This is huge,” the mom of two said. “If I could save somebody that is on life support now, even if I could save one person, I’d feel blessed.”
She’s working with Mount Sinai hospital now to get tested for the antibodies.
For Julie Thaler, who was also part of the original cluster of Westchester infections, signing up to donate plasma “wasn’t even a question.”
“I truly believe that I am on my way to saving lives,” Thaler, 57, told The Post as she geared up to donate Friday through Columbia University after fighting the virus for nearly a month.
“It’s critical. The light at the end of this tunnel of this long debilitating illness is that you can help to save lives and we possess antibodies that can do that,” Thaler said.
“This is such a huge unknown. Which is why people like me and other survivors need to help scientists answer these questions.”
For viruses that have been fully studied, developing antibodies typically means immunity but Wajnberg said it’s still not clear if that’s the case with COVID-19 survivors.
It’s also not clear how long the antibodies, and immunity, will remain in their system. Even though the U.S. and China haven’t seen reinfections on a “wide scale,” more research needs to be done to see the program’s true impact and survivors still need to take precautions, Wajnberg said.
But as hundreds of people die everyday from the virus, and doctors work around the clock to slow those numbers, Berrent believes the survivors and their willingness to help scientists find answers “is the epicenter of hope.”
“And I think that that’s really powerful,” said Berrent, who was participant #001 at Columbia University’s plasma donation program.
“Because there’s nothing we need more as a global community than hope.”
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