There’s a Blood Shortage!

With Halloween costumes and candy starting to be in the stores, many of us are starting to think about vampire costumes and blood sucking monsters, though it seems unsporting to already be planning your Vampire Halloween costume when there is a huge national blood and plasma shortage.

There’s also an ongoing shortage of plasma that keeps the ECMO life support machines running, the ones that allow the sickest COVID patients to live. (It takes units and units of plasma to even get these miracle machines going…)

Apparently, people aren’t donating blood as often as they were before the Coronavirus upended our lives, mostly because they can’t do big corporate blood drives when people are working from their sofa. In addition, many of the regular blood and plasma donation crew are sidelined due to possible Covid exposure right now, especially with the academic year getting underway in person.
And apparently people are scared of getting Covid while donating blood. (Ummm, you’re way more likely to get Covid on an ill-advised blind date with your sister’s friend’s ex-husband’s brother than you are giving blood!)

Since it turns out that convalescent plasma doesn’t work well as a Covid treatment, there hasn’t been much of a media call for people to donate plasma recently. That makes it even harder to get people in the door.

Sooooo, if you want to dress up as a Vampire this Halloween–and have a clear conscience about doing so– you ought to go donate some of that very important human go-go juice for someone who really needs it.