In a recent study that came out of Wuhan, China, it has been found that people with Type A blood are much more likely to catch the coronavirus than people with blood Type O.
This particular part of China is where the virus originated. The study also states that those with blood Type A were more likely to die from the COVID-19. This report that was published on Medrxiv.org compared the blood types of over 2,000 confirmed cases in Wuhan and Shenzhen to the more than 3,600 healthy residents in the area.
According to this report, 34% of the general population have Type O blood which is more common than the 32% with Type A. However, among the patients who contracted the virus only 25% had Type O blood whereas 41% of patients had Type-A.
Other academies around the world are looking into this report as researchers are trying to learn as much as they can about the virus as quickly as possible.
According to the report:
Researchers in China assessed 2,173 people who had been diagnosed with the coronavirus, including 206 people who died after contracting the virus, from three hospitals in Hubei.
Academics compared the data of the infected Wuhan patients with 3,694 non-infected people in the same region.
Of the 206 patients in the study who died, 85 had type A blood, equivalent to 41 per cent of all deaths.
In the healthy Wuhan population, a city of 11 million people, 34 per cent of people are type A.
In the study cohort, 52 of the people who died were type O, making up a quarter of all deaths. Under normal conditions just 32 per cent of people are type O.
The figures for all infections, not just deaths, are 26 per cent and 38 per cent for type O and type A, respectively.
Researchers urge people with Type A blood not to panic and are working on the growing sample size in the study.
A researcher in the city of Tianjin, Gao Yingdai, told reporters, “If you are type A, there is no need to panic. It does not mean you will be infected 100 percent. If you are type O, it does not mean you are absolutely safe, either. You still need to wash your hands and follow the guidelines issued by authorities.”
