National level adjustments to the challenges of the SARS‐CoV2 pandemic on blood banking operations

BACKGROUND: SARS‐CoV2 causing coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) is responsible for an unprecedented worldwide pandemic severely affecting all activities of societies including blood banking. We aimed to systematically collect key indicators in a nationally centralized blood banking system and to perform comparisons between 2020 and 2019. METHODS: Count data for January–December 2020 and 2019 were extracted from the integrated informatics system of Hungarian National Blood Transfusion Service and analyzed by simple graphics, tabulations, and statistics. RESULTS: Whole blood donation activity showed a highly significant decline due to a sharp decrease in field donations by an average fall of 24% (range:17%–28%) during March–May 2020 compared to identical period of 2019. A second, more moderate decline accompanied the second wave in late fall. The simultaneous increase in institutional donations did not counterbalance this decline. Donor exclusion rates fell significantly by an average of 1,1% (range:0.9%–1.6%) in the three spring lockdown‐affected months. First‐time and repeat donors showed decreased turn‐out in larger proportions compared to highly repeat donors. Interestingly, among repeat and highly repeat donors, females showed less‐pronounced declines compared to males while this was not observed among first‐time donors. In June–September, a remarkable swing‐back was observed among highly repeat female donors. Product utilization fell most notably for RBC (mean:26.2%) but also for PLT (mean:19.8%) and FFP (mean:24.3%) and showed a full recovery in June–September followed by a second decline. CONCLUSION: Trends and reaction patterns of blood banking reported by our study may be useful in future planning and adjustments of blood banking activities.