A European study published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine found that people with Type A blood were 45 percent more likely to develop severe COVID-19 requiring oxygen supplementation or a ventilator than people with other blood types and that those with Type O blood were 35 percent less likely.
The study involved 1,610 patients with severe COVID-19 and 2,205 control subjects.
Other stories indicate the percentage is 50 % both ways, not 45 and 35.
But people with Type O can still get very sick.
"They have a decreased risk to get infected and to develop severe disease," study author Andre Franke, a professor of molecular medicine at the University of Kiel in Germany, said in an email.
"However, this is only a relative risk reduction, i.e. there is no full protection. Among our patients who died there were also many with blood group O."
A couple of related papers have been released on the preprint server medRxiv without the peer review scrutiny that published papers typically receive.
Studies in China and New York both found that people with Type A blood had a greater risk of coronavirus infection than those with other blood types, while those with Type O had a lower risk.
And the gene testing company 23andMe wrote a blog post about preliminary unpublished data suggesting that people with Type O blood were less likely to test positive for the coronavirus than others.
People with O are less likely to get infected.
But as for severity once you get infected, the advantage of O is swamped by the disadvantage of risk factors.
Any possible influence of blood type on COVID-19 appears small compared with the substantial impact of known risk factors, such as older age and underlying health conditions, said Glatt, who is a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
"In any individual patient, if they have risk factors or they don't have risk factors, that is far, far more important," he said.
But haven't we heard about this before?
Recycling old news?
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