WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 01st June, 2021) Screening of donors for COVID-19 has maintained the safety of the US blood supply without testing the blood itself, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said in a report on Tuesday.
"The new analysis is based on 17,995 pools of donated blood, representative of 257,809 single blood donations collected between March and September 2020 from six US metropolitan regions," the report said.
Current guidelines do not require testing blood samples for the novel coronavirus but do require that donors be screened for physical symptoms of COVID-19 and for infections that occurred within 14 days of the blood donation. The blood of donors with recent COVID-19 infections, or who develop infections after recent donations, cannot be used, the report said.
Blood donations examined for the report were subjected to highly sensitive nucleic acid amplification tests, which have been documented to be 99.96 percent effective at detecting genetic components of the novel coronavirus. Of the thousands of samples tested, just three came back positive, all with very low concentrations of the virus, the report added.
Researchers concluded the likelihood of a transfusion recipient receiving blood with trace amounts of the novel coronavirus was approximately 0.001 percent - a little over 1 in 100,000 - and that the likelihood of transmission by blood transfusion was insignificant compared to airborne transmission, according to the report.
