Testing the association between blood type and COVID-19 infection, intubation, and death

Michael Zietz; Nicholas P. Tatonetti

The significant associations we found for blood type between COV+ and COV-individuals were far from significant in a comparison between COV+ and the general population at NYP/CUIMC. A possible explanation for this finding is that individuals tested for infection at NYP/CUIMC represent a more homogeneous sub-population of patients at NYP/CUIMC. Increased homogeneity would strengthen the blood-group-COVID-19 association signal as it would reduce the influence of overall population differences in blood-type distribution. We did not find sufficient evidence to conclude that SARS-CoV-2-tested individuals have a significantly different blood group distribution than the general population at NYP/CUIMC, though we cannot rule out other differences between tested and general populations that could explain the difference in associations. Moreover, our meta-analysis using COV+ vs general population found significant associations between A, B, and O blood groups, and the NYP/CUIMC data received 20-30 percent weight for each comparison, indicating a large contribution to the pooled associations. Further work is needed to understand how the population of COVID-tested patients differs from the general population.