{"id":269241,"date":"2020-09-17T05:12:11","date_gmt":"2020-09-17T09:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=269241"},"modified":"2020-09-19T05:41:20","modified_gmt":"2020-09-19T09:41:20","slug":"blood-donations-show-that-the-united-states-is-still-nowhere-near-herd-immunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2020\/09\/17\/blood-donations-show-that-the-united-states-is-still-nowhere-near-herd-immunity\/","title":{"rendered":"Blood donations show that the United States is still nowhere near herd immunity"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Blood donations aren\u2019t a random sample of the population, but the data can give researchers an idea how much of a population has been exposed to the virus, a concept known as seroprevalence, and how susceptible different populations remain to continuing outbreaks. (Pixabay photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Less than 2 percent of nearly 1 million blood donors tested positive for coronavirus antibodies<\/strong><\/p>\n

To better understand how widely the coronavirus has spread in the United States, some researchers are turning to an unusual source of data: blood donations.<\/p>\n

In an effort to encourage more donations, many blood collection centers have been offering to test donated blood for\u00a0antibodies to the coronavirus<\/a>, which indicates a past infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Of the nearly 1 million Americans who donated blood to the Red Cross from June 15 to August 23 and were tested,\u00a0only 1.82 percent had the antibodies<\/a>.\u00a0That finding suggests that the vast majority of Americans have yet to be infected with the virus, researchers report September 14 in\u00a0JAMA<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Blood donations aren\u2019t a random sample of the population, but the data can give researchers an idea how much of a population has been exposed to the virus, a concept known as seroprevalence, and how susceptible different populations remain to continuing outbreaks.<\/p>\n

While seroprevalence was generally low across the country, there was variation among different demographic groups. African-American and Hispanic donors had slightly higher seroprevalence, compared with white donors, which matches patterns seen in clinical diagnoses of COVID-19.<\/p>\n

Seroprevalence varied by region too. All regions except the Northeast experienced modest increases in seroprevalence over the course of the summer. By August 23, the South had a seroprevalence of about 2.9 percent, higher than the Midwest (about 2.7 percent) or West (about 2.4 percent) or Northeast (about 2.1 percent).<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by Science News<\/a>, a nonprofit independent news organization.
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Less than 2 percent of nearly 1 million blood donors tested positive for coronavirus antibodies To better understand how widely …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":269242,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-269241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","category-news-w","mauthors-jonathan-lambert","mauthors-science-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269241"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269263,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269241\/revisions\/269263"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}