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The announcement of the FDA arrives a day after New York City Governor Andrew Cuomo has declared that the government's health department intends to start the medication of the sickest patients of COVID-19 with plasma that is abundant in antibodies from the blood of those treated patients.

It has been used for decades, throughout the 1918 flu pandemic before the modern immunization and antivirals. The drug was known as the convalescent plasma. Some specialists suggested that the best chance for the battle against coronavirus might be to establish further advanced treatments for the next several months.

The Food and Drug Administration will now allow nationwide healthcare professionals to begin treating patients with serious conditions of the virus by the use of plasma provided by survivors of the coronavirus within a new emergency protocol that was implemented on Tuesday.

The experimental procedure is currently restricted to people who are at risk of death and in severe state of health. In compliance with FDA-approved emergency guidelines, doctors may apply for authorization to give medication on critically ill patients with COVID-19 on a case-by-case basis. 

According to the agency, within four to eight hours, the FDA will reply to many other demands. Doctors should contact the Emergency Operations Office of the FDA to get clearance over the telephone for patients who will need medication sooner.

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Previous research suggests that successful infusions of convalescent plasma can also safeguard healthcare professionals at the frontline against severe illness. Specialists have said it will possibly function best if it was offered to people before even the side effects become more and more serious that is if the treatment were proven to be safe and effective.

Dr. Jeffrey Henderson, an associate professor of medicine and molecular microbiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has this to say: "The approach definitely has merit, and what's remarkable about it is it's not a new idea; it's been with us for a good hundred years or longer."

Led by a team from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Henderson is part of an international team of doctors and researchers collaborating on strategies for using plasma to treat patients living with COVID-19 disease caused by the coronavirus.

Health authorities in New York have mentioned that they intend to start hiring people who have recovered completely from COVID-19 this week. Authorities said that the initiative was possibly due to the population of people who have already recovered in New Rochelle, a suburb in the city of New York, which was the epicenter of the State's first outbreak a few weeks ago.

The FDA warned that plasma was not proven to be efficient for COVID-19 and that scientists seeking to study it even more extensively should request permission to continue a trial. Researchers also said, if authorized in the following weeks, extensive use of recovery plasma would need to be coordinated among hospitals and the blood banks of the country.