Neutralising antibodies to SARS coronavirus 2 in Scottish blood donors - a pilot study of the value of serology to determine population exposure

Craig Thompson; Nicholas Grayson; Robert Paton; José Lourenço; Bridget Penman; Lian Ni Lee; Valerie Odon; Juthathip Mongkolsapaya; Senthil Chinnakannan; Wanwisa Dejnirattisai; Matthew Edmans; Alexander Fyfe; Carol Imlach; Kreepa Kooblall; Nicholas Lim; Chang Liu; Cesar Lopez-Camacho; Carol-Anne McInally; Narayan Ramamurthy; Jeremy Ratcliff; Piyada Supasa; Beibei Wang; Alexander J Mentzer; Marc Turner; Calum Semple; John Kenneth Baillie; Heli Harvala; Gavin Screaton; Nigel Temperton; Paul Klenerman; Lisa Jarvis; Sunetra Gupta; Peter Simmonds

In the current study we have taken the first steps towards estimating SARS-CoV-2 exposure 100 in a European country by measuring seroprevalence in a sample of blood donations. Samples from donors in an age range from 18-75 years collected across Scotland on the 17 th March and 21 st -23 rd of March, 2020 were assayed for neutralising antibody to SARS-CoV-2 using a pseudotyped SARS-CoV-2 virus microneutralisation (pMN) assay format used previously for SARS-CoV-1 and Ebolavirus seroepidemiology purposes [13] [14] [15] and confirmed using an 105 . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.