The Edges of Time. A Spring of Hope

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the winter of despair, it was a Spring of Hope… those words, written almost one and half centuries ago by Charles Dickens in “A Tale of Two Cities” struck me with their appropriateness today, in our times.

To me, it feels like we are living on the edges of time. That has never been easy. As a child during the 1990s, I saw the edges of time when one of the biggest nations in the world, the USSR, collapsed.

When people are lost and their world is in ruins, recovery is slow and painful and often like building a house one brick at a time. If, instead, we attempted to build a digitalized world based on technological control of every aspect of it, we run the risk of losing the very freedoms which make it possible to do this. Even for the alleged “better good,” I find this unacceptable.

I prefer that world arise renewed as people realise what is of real value and has been for centuries. I am talking about clean air and uncontaminated water and food. I am talking about a real sense of helping one another. I am talking about a hierarchy of values which includes health, family, nature and living together in harmony. I’m not saying that I think technology per se is bad. It has no more intrinsic moral value than any other tool. The morality is the province of those who use the technology.

I was pleased, on the C-19 front, to hear about the first person healed with blood plasma from patients who recovered from this infectious disease. Last week, at the Sklifosovsky Research Institute for Emergency Medicine, Moscow, Russia, plasma from people already recovered with C-19 illnesses was transfused into those battling Covid-19. Doctors save from COVID-19 using plasma and look for donors – said in Russian newspaper

There are already first good results. One of the patients said he felt better the very next morning “Just like the disease was taken off with a hand,” was how he expressed it.

Institute director Sergey Petrikov explained, “Antibodies are those substances that neutralize the antigen, i.e. the virus, so when they inject plasma with antibodies from people that have recently been ill and recovered who have high enough titres, the antibodies begin to fight the virus and the person becomes feeling well”.

The first effectiveness of this treatment was confirmed by Chinese doctors. Now, the procedure has been adopted by South Korea. The German Regensburg Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene André Gessner tried it as well and after their first transfusions, feel positive about this method too.

There is more good news from America: Plasma treatment being tested in New York may be coronavirus ‘game changer’. As blood transfusions have to be complying the medical guidelines, this week American Food & Drug Administration (FDA) issued Recommendations for Investigational COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma.

In Ukraine, the work is on the way, as well. My country has become one of five which began producing its own tests for antibodies to C-19. We are adopting this protocol too, following the American experience with it.

Perhaps the most heart-warming part of this is the incredible willingness of the recovered to help, with their own blood, those in a critical state. Is that not what Jesus did for us?

God bless and help us to get through these times