Lower prevalence of antibodies neutralizing SARS-CoV-2 in group O French blood donors

We investigated the distribution of antibodies neutralizing SARS-CoV-2 according to age, sex or blood group in French blood donors. In 464 samples collected before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (2017 and 2018), our virus neutralization assay had a 100% specificity. It was used to test 998 samples collected from blood donors during the last week of March or the first week of April 2020. As expected at this stage of the outbreak, the prevalence was low (2.7%) and, importantly, criteria for blood donation imply that the vast majority of seropositives had asymptomatic or pauci-symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections. Seroprevalence values did not differ significantly among age groups (but were slightly higher in donors <30yo and ≥60yo), and between males and females (2.82% vs 2.69%), unlike what has been observed regarding hospitalizations admission to ICU and death rates in France. By contrast, we observed that the proportion of seropositives was significantly lower in group O donors (1.32% vs 3.86% in other donors, p = 0.014). We conclude that virus infection seems to occur with a similar incidence in men and women among French blood donors, but that blood group O persons are less at risk of being infected and not only of suffering from severe clinical presentations, as previously suggested.