 I am Dr. Shivram, consultate and head of transfusion medicine at Manipal Hospital Bangalore. As all of you know, the plasma therapy for covid patients is the in thing currently. And this is being offered to patients as a good supplementary treatment to the existing drugs and other modalities. Well, let us understand what is convalescent plasma or covid plasma. The convalescent covid plasma is plasma collected from a patient who has recovered from covid 28 days after complete recovery of symptoms. So how does this benefit a patient? The very fact that this patient has recovered from covid means that he has probably developed antibodies which destroyed his virus. So we now want to collect this plasma containing antibodies and give it to another patient affected by covid. But the challenges here are first determining whether there are adequate quantities of antibodies present in the plasma for which we use the help of our microbiology department. We first determine what is the quantity of the antibody present in the donor that is the recovered patient. And then we collect the plasma from the donor and give it to the patient. That's about the source of convalescent plasma. A few words about who can donate convalescent plasma. The donors should have recovered from covid-19 infection. The age of the donor should be between 18 to 60 years. Males and Nalli Gravda females that is females who have never been pregnant can donate convalescent covid plasma. Weight of the donor should be more than 50 kgs and the donor should meet the regular blood donation criteria. According to the patient, who are the patients who are likely to benefit from this plasma. It has been shown that patients who are suffering from moderate disease are likely to benefit from plasma therapy. Patients who have mild disease, there is no indication. Patients with severe disease who are already on ventilator or who have gone into multi-organ failure are unlikely to benefit from covid plasma therapy. Therefore covid plasma therapy should be offered to patients on moderate disease who have increased in oxygen requirements despite use of steroids and other drugs which are given to cure this condition. The plasma is collected by a procedure known as aphorosis. Now this aphorosis is a very simple procedure where we can collect the particular component required. Here we are going to collect plasma and the time for this process will be around 1 hour. So mostly in 2 hours the entire procedure process will be completed. Next donors commonly feel that what will happen to me if you take away my antibodies. Natural apprehension for any donor who has just recovered from covid. Let us understand that any adult patient with about 5 litres of blood and 3 litres of plasma in his body, we collect only 400 ml of plasma. That means you are still left with more than 2.5 litres of plasma with adequate antibodies in you. We do not take all of it, we only take a small portion of the antibodies. The second doubt which patients have is that slowly my antibody levels will go down. So what will happen to me if I have a reinfection? Please understand that in the event of a reinfection, your body has got a type of white blood cells called the memory B cells which can produce antibodies very quickly in the event of reinfection. Though Karnataka has recorded more than 3 lakh covid-19 infections and more than 2 lakh people have recovered so far, but still only few hundreds of people have donated to Karnataka. So we receive around 30-40 requests from across Bangalore daily, but we are able to honour only 3-4 requests till now and hence I request common public to come forward and donate convalescent plasma in good numbers. You are therefore still protected against covid, against the same strain of covid even after donating plasma which is the source of antibodies to cure covid.