PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Doctors at Virtua Health in South Jersey are encouraged by the success of a COVID-19 antibody treatment that's being used on patients with mild to moderate symptoms.
It isn't for everyone, not yet anyway. Virtua Health doctors have been prescribing this treatment for patients with mild to moderate symptoms who are at high risk for severe symptoms only.
"It's a treatment of monoclonal antibodies, which are lab-made proteins," said Dr. Martin Topiel, chief of infectious disease at Virtua Health. "It's medicine that the president received when he had COVID-19."
The treatment is called bamlanivimab — it's hard to say and not easy to administer either. Because of that, not every hospital system is offering it.
"You really need an infusion center where there's a safety set up and it’s not used for other purposes. Patients receive the infusion over an hour with observation over an hour. So you really need the right staffing for it," explained Topiel.
And staffing has been a problem at hospitals everywhere.
60-year-old Jay Siegmeister, from Cherry Hill, has a type of blood and bone cancer that puts him at high risk and makes him eligible for the treatment.
"And I was able to recover a lot quicker, I feel, if I didn't have the treatment," he said. "It's not that (the symptoms) were gone but they were less than the day before and within a week, I felt like I was completely recovered."
Siegmeister said it was painless and because he's had infusions in the past, it was nothing new to him.