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| A young woman puts on a face mask as she rides an escalator on the Moscow Underground. As of March 17, Russia had confirmed more than 100 cases of the novel coronavirus, with more than 50 cases in Moscow. Mikhail Tereshchenko/TASS |
By Park Si-soo
People with type A blood are more likely to catch coronavirus while those with type O seem more resistant, a preliminary study of about 2,000 patients in China showed.
A team of Chinese researchers, led by Wang Xinghuan from the Centre for Evidence-Based and Translational Medicine at Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, conducted the study.
They took blood group patterns of patients in Wuhan and Shenzhen and compared them to local healthy populations. They found that blood type A patients showed a higher rate of infection and tended to develop more severe symptoms.
In the general population, type O blood (34 percent) is more common than type A (32 percent). But in the infected, this was reversed, with type O people at 25 percent and type A at 41 percent. People with type O blood made up 25 percent of deaths in the research. Normally, people with type O blood account for 32 percent Wuhan's population.
"People of blood group A might need particularly strengthened personal protection to reduce the chance of infection," the researchers wrote. They said patients with type A blood might need to receive more vigilant surveillance and aggressive treatment.
While the researchers noted that the study was preliminary and more work was needed, they urged governments and medical facilities to consider blood-type differences when planning mitigation measures or treating patients.
