By the beginning of May, we will be looking at more than one million cases of the coronavirus in the US in just three months. There were 30,000 new cases reported per day during the month of April. Looking at the data, it would appear that plans for re-opening our commonwealth and country are premature, as getting control of the virus would seem to be a prerequisite to such a move. The economy won’t rebound until people feel safe to resume lives that include being in places with other people nearby.

Thankfully, steps toward getting that control and creating that sense of safety have been moving apace.

Eventually, we will get to a place where universal testing will occur. We can then quarantine new cases, and contact trace to find the people who had interacted with the person who tested positive. We’re starting to see antibody testing, and we will soon determine whether having had the virus makes you immune to future infection, a step toward so-called “herd immunity.”*

The ultimate control over the virus will occur when we have a reliable vaccine, but that is not likely to occur before early next year at the least.

Right now, anyone in a risk category looks at the virus as a potential death sentence. But medical science has been as unrelenting as the virus. While we await a vaccine, potential treatments for the virus are being tested around the globe, and there are promising medical interventions on the horizon.

The use of plasma shows great promise. Plasma essentially is blood with the red and white blood cells removed, leaving proteins and antibodies in the fluid. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced an initiative on March 24 to collect plasma, and the Red Cross started collecting it from recovered Covid-19 patients on March 30, saying it “believes that this effort is necessary and urgent to enable rapid access to potentially lifesaving care for those seriously ill. The Red Cross has been asked by the FDA to help identify prospective donors and manage the distribution of these products to hospitals treating patients in need.”

Information on the effort is atRedCrossBlood. org/plasma4covid.

Dr. Jon Pincus, head of infectious disease at the Codman Square Health Center, said in an interview that “while controlled trials are still under way, there are anecdotal published case series from China reporting clinical improvement using convalescent plasma. In one study, 2 out of 3 patients on mechanical ventilation were weaned from ventilators, and in another study, 3 out of 5 were able to be weaned. The exact mechanism is unclear, but convalescent plasma also appeared to be helpful in treating similar infections like MERS and SARS in the past. It’s unclear why it works so well, but there is anecdotal information of dramatic improvement within days via use of plasma from those cured of Covid-19.

“In Paris, researchers have found that the drug tocilizumab greatly reduced the need for mechanical ventilators and lowered the death rate of Covid-19 patients in respiratory failure,” Pincus said. “Researchers emphasized that more study is needed, but still, it’s a sign that we’re closer to getting treatments that will lower the mortality rate.”

Here in Massachusetts, we may not be in any position to do more than plan a re-opening of the commonwealth, but we have reason to hope that there will be one.

In the meantime, with Mayor Walsh saying that he will mandate wearing masks/face coverings if Bostonians fail to do so themselves, follow his lead. Social distancing and hand washing seem to have taken hold, so keep at that, too. We’ll get there quicker if you do.

* When most of a population is immune to an infectious disease, this provides indirect protection—or herd immunity (also called herd protection)—to those who are not immune to the disease, according to specialists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. For example, they say, “if 80 percent of a population is immune to a virus, four out of every five people who encounter someone with the disease won’t get sick (and won’t spread the disease any further). In this way, the spread of infectious diseases is kept under control. Depending how contagious an infection is, usually 70 percent to 90 percent of a population needs immunity to achieve herd protection.”

Bill Walczak of Dorchester is the cofounder and former CEO of the Codman Square Health Center. His column appears weekly in the Reporter.