The 61-year-old postal worker arrived at Austin’s Ascension Seton hospital in April in respiratory distress—he had a high fever, struggled to breath, and needed large doses of supplemental oxygen.
When Raul Chagoya’s COVID-19 test came back positive, his treating physicians in the ER alerted Jeff Yorio, the hospital’s chief of hematology and oncology, who spoke with Chagoya remotely via a visual app. Yorio asked whether he’d like to participate in convalescent plasma therapy, a fast-growing real time experiment that has sprung up in hospitals nationwide to save the lives of the sickest COVID-19 patients. “He was both excited and interested,” Yorio recalls. As Chagoya, a father and grandfather, later told the Austin CBS News affiliate: “To be honest, I didn’t want to die.”
Soon, Chagoya joined 28,248 others enrolled at 2,471 participating sites in a treatment and research effort loosely coordinated by the Mayo Clinic. Approximately 20,000 people received plasma treatments nationwide in April, May, and early June.
