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

SARS-CoV-2 as a marker of past infection. Interpretation. Although we cannot use the rise in numbers seropositive to infer the contemporary seroprevalence or the growth rate of the epidemic, we note that they are consistent with frequency of reported diagnosed infections and SARS-CoV-2-associated 60 deaths reported in that time period in Scotland, given that seroconversion takes up to [2] [3] weeks. It should also be noted that blood donors are not representative of the general population; in particular, those with a history of recent respiratory infections are deferred. [1] [2] [3] [4] . Since the first reports in December, 2019, infections with SARS-CoV-2 have been reported from an increasing number of countries worldwide, with particularly high incidence of diagnosed infections and associated deaths from respiratory disease initially in China but more recently in Italy, Iran, Spain, France and the USA (https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019). Increasing age, male 80 gender, smoking and comorbidities such as cardiac disease, hypertension and diabetes have been identified as risk factors for severe infections [5] [6] [7] . For as yet unknown reasons, infants and children seem to be less at risk for moderate to severe COVID-19 disease 8 .