Covid-19: Nepal reports successful plasma therapy treatment

Nepal's health authorities have announced that their first plasma therapy treatment has been successful.

A 60-year-old coronavirus patient, who was in critical condition, recovered after receiving plasma therapy, reports Xinhua.

The patient is now close to full recovery, said Santa Kumar Das, the coordinator of a COVID-19 management committee at Tribhuvan University Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu where the patient was treated.

He said doctors treated the patient on July 30 with the plasma therapy after taking blood from a man with an estimated age of 30 years.

"Before we treated him with this method, the patient required 80-90 percent external oxygen," Das said Monday.

He explained that 48 hours after administering the plasma therapy, the patient required only 24-28 percent external oxygen.

He said that his hospital has taken it as a successful case with a patient recovering well and is ready to go home if he is tested negative for the virus.

Plasma therapy is not a universally accepted method of treating COVID-19 patients. This therapy is being used as a test case in many countries.

According to Das, 12 hospitals have been appointed where the plasma therapy can be performed to treat COVID-19 patients in Nepal.

The Himalayan country has 20,750 confirmed coronavirus cases and reported 57 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Coronavirus cases were reported in China in December last year. In March this year, the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic.

JHU data showed that the officially confirmed coronavirus cases have crossed 18 million with more than 693,000 deaths.