If you’re bitten or scratched by an animal with rabies, your doctor can give you a shot to prevent the virus from taking hold …
If you’re bitten or scratched by an animal with rabies, your doctor can give you a shot to prevent the virus from taking hold in you and causing an infection. The same concept is now being put to the test for the coronavirus. Most people who get sick with COVID-19 produce antibodies in their blood that seem protect them from re-infection. A study is now underway to see whether an infusion of those antibodies can protect someone who has been exposed to the virus and is at high risk of infection. One of the first volunteers for this study is a physician who treats transplant patients at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Jonathan Orens had a close brush with coronavirus, involving not his work, but his family. His daughter from Los Angeles wanted to come home to be near her sister, who was about to give birth to her first baby. Orens says the traveling daughter was careful about protecting her health in Los Angeles, and did everything she could think of to stay safe on her flight to Baltimore. “She wore a mask, she wore gloves, she had sanitizer, she had wipes,” he says. “The load on the plane was relatively small.” They chose the Fourth of July as a travel day, knowing that even fewer people were likely to be traveling that day. “We actually bought the two seats in the row to keep her away from everybody else.” She wore masks through the airports and in the car ride back to her parents’ house. Once there, she kept her distance from them. Just to be sure, about a week after she arrived, she and her parents went for coronavirus testing. Though she had no symptoms, “she was positive,” Orens says. “And fortunately my wife and I were negative.” But they were still at high risk of contracting the disease, given the close contact with their daughter. As luck would have it, one of Orens’ colleagues at Hopkins was just starting a study to see if purified blood serum from people who have recovered from COVID-19 — called convalescent plasma — could prevent the disease in someone else.
