An Insight into Association Between COVID-19 Infection and ABO Blood Group

ABSTRACT

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a pandemic that is triggered by a novel coronavirus, named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2) or 2019-nCoV, causes primarily respiratory discomfort along with other mild symptoms/no symptoms, leading to severe illness and death, if proper care is not taken. At present, COVID-19 is the resilient reason for a large number of human casualties worldwide as well as a cause of crucial economic loss posturing global threat. There is a necessity of intensive research to elucidate the pathogenic mechanisms of COVID-19, which would assist in understating the susceptibility towards the infection as well as prompt development of effective prevention and treatment strategies. Over the years, clinical studies have indicated the risk of various pathogenic infections prejudiced due to preexisting chronic diseases as well as ABO blood group types to a larger extent. In line of this, current COVID-19 infection-associated clinical studies intensely endorse the relationship of blood group type of individual and risk of COVID-19 infection. In this chapter, various clinical studies from January 2020 to June 2020 have been summarized to highlight the eminence of ABO blood group and COVID-19 infection susceptibility in human population. These reports evidently support the fact that individuals with A histo blood group were found to be more vulnerable to COVID-19 infection whereas individuals with blood group O were less likely to get infected with virus. To get deeper insight in this fact, many more studies are desirable in order to further explicate the promising protective role of the blood group O and it will be supportive for designing and planning several additional countermeasures against COVID-19 infection. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021.