(Newswire.net — September 24, 2020) —
This past spring thousands of people were dying of COVID-19 in the New York tri-state area. Many who lived on the East Coast thought that this pandemic might evade affecting them and stay in China, Europe and the West Coast. This was far from the truth. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut did not know what hit them. One day people were going to Broadway shows and having a good time and then the world suddenly shut down as everyone seemed to know someone who was dying from this plague.
Originally, doctors were pretty much clueless of the best way to treat this disease since they had never encountered it before. Then some doctors realized that antibodies of those who had already been sick could be the key to saving lives. The Mayo Clinic wanted to test a population of those who had recovered from their infections. They reached out to Bikur Cholim, a social service agency, to contact a large group of people to be tested. This agency knew how to accomplish the task but needed financial help to do so.
This is where Streamline Verify, an OIG exclusion screening software company came to the rescue. Streamline Verify is a private company that has found a way to streamline the process of doing exclusion screening checks for all entities in the health care arena. They knew they had to sponsor these efforts do whatever they could to save lives and time was of the essence.
More than 12,000 of those who recovered from COVID-19 infections took in-depth surveys about the variety of symptoms they suffered. Then out of that group approximately 6500 were called back to have their antibodies tested. Streamline Verify assisted with this effort as part of their Antibody Everybody initiative.
35% of those tested had antibodies. Of those people, 600 were called back to be donors of convalescent plasma. Streamline Verify was eager to help by turning 7000 square feet of their corporate offices into a field hospital. Word spread that they were hosting the largest plasma drive on record in the U.S. and the press rushed to cover it the story, including major stations in the New York area: Those include Pix11; CBS and ABC.
The world is eagerly awaiting a vaccine that will be effective but until then, doctors must use all the tools, tmb peroxidase and modalities that are currently available to save lives. That is why Streamline Verify has been working with the Covid Plasma Initiative, who has formed alliances with blood banks across the country, to get the plasma rapidly to areas where there is a high rate of infections. Also, in the near future the NIH, who is studying the data from the surveys done back in the spring, will be publishing their findings in peer reviewed scientific journals to make their findings available to medical professionals across the world.