Your blood type could influence whether you live or die if you catch the corona virus

[SirBillybob]

The titles of most of the press articles referencing the NEJM study of Spanish and Italian patients are accurate. The summary paragraphs, in contrast, tend to contain wording that can lead to misinterpretation, including your recent attachment (medicalxpress.com). I might add that journalists do not typically have their guest commentators, in this case clinicians, vet the final draft.

 

The press article main content errors in this case do not stampede the horses or lead to lowering guard. It is a problem, however, if an A blood type panics about susceptibility to hosting the virus, what is colloquially termed “catching” it. If you have Covid-19, you caught it for sure. You cannot catch severity. If you are writing or talking about severity, the redundancy of “catching” semantically gets translated to susceptibility to acquiring the virus.

 

I should additionally add that not all clinical commentators read the manuscript they are asked to comment on. One clinician described the control group in such a way that the reader would interpret the control group as being infected with SARS-CoV-2 but not sick. As I wrote earlier, the control group was a reference sample that simply benchmarked normative blood type distributions within similar geographic jurisdictions as the Covid-19 patients. It would have helped if the researchers did not label them “participants” because it was simply a blood donor database.

 

Your original post links to the NEJM article. There is nothing to stop you from comparing its content to press articles that assert the NEJM research paper links blood type to becoming infected (aka ‘hosting), asymptomatic or otherwise, with SARS-CoV-2; to acquiring any symptomatic presentation of Covid-19 disease along the pre-severity continuum within which the majority of symptomatic persons fall; or to death. The NEJM article does not report on any of those three associations. It reports on a subset of severity defined by respiratory distress.

Edited June 21, 2020 by SirBIllybob