First do no harm—beware the risk of therapeutic plasma exchange in severe COVID-19

First do no harm—beware the risk of therapeutic plasma exchange in severe COVID-19

by Klaus Stahl, Christian Bode and Sascha David 

Critical Care volume 24, Article number: 363 (2020)

Letter to the editor:

With great interest, we read the article by Keith et al. [1] suggesting adjunctive therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE) as a potential novel treatment approach for severe COVID-19. The basis for their hypothesis builds on the observation that patients with deleterious systemic response to severe infections such as sepsis do not usually die from the underlying pathogen itself but rather from the overwhelming pathological host response to it.