Severe blood supply shortages in Bay Area

According to Dr. Suchi Pandey, chief medical officer at Stanford Blood Center, this year has seen greater demand in addition to a lower supply compared to previous summers.

“This national blood shortage is the worst that people have seen in decades,” Pandey said. “So when you combine increased usage with challenges in collecting due to COVID, it’s just a bad combination.”

Total usage — or the amount of blood that hospitals require — was almost 15% higher during May to July of this year than it was during the same period in 2019, based on the hospitals that Stanford Blood Center supplies. Usage for platelets, which helps blood clot and is important for cancer and transplant patients, among others, was up by approximately 20%. While all blood types are in need, Type O blood and platelets are always in particularly high demand, the latter of which only has a shelf life of about one week.

While it’s hard to point to exact causes of higher utilization this summer compared to previous ones, the causes of supply shortage are easier to pinpoint. Prior to the pandemic, up to 70% of blood drives were held at large corporations and educational facilities, according to Pandey. For Vitalant, a national blood donation network with a location in San Mateo, up to 25% of the organization’s supply used to come from high school or college campus blood drives.

“A good percentage of our donors are students, and without schools being in session or not having students on campus, that has made it difficult, if not impossible, to donate,” Kevin Adler, communications manager at Vitalant, said.

Prior to the pandemic, the slower pace of donations in the summer was expected and would be made up for during fall and winter months. However, even with most schools returning to in-person instruction, stricter guidelines around on campus gatherings leave school drives fewer and farther between.

It has also meant that many blood donation centers have pivoted to the community blood drive model, which entails hosting a drive from a mobile vehicle in a neighborhood setting. Though it has certainly helped make up for the shortfall, the adjustment strategy must be paired with added incentives to entice donors into the fixed donation centers as well.

“When holding a blood drive at a high school or at a Big Tech company, it would be very productive,” Pandey said. “But now, to collect that same amount of blood, we have to hold a lot more of the smaller community drives in different places.”

Across the country, hospitals have had to postpone elective surgeries or other noncritical procedures this summer. Fortunately, to Adler and Pandey’s knowledge, the shortage has not resulted in treatment delays for the regional hospitals they serve, but the low supply has meant an increasingly thin buffer.

Vitalant strives to have a four day supply at all times, but has oftentimes dipped below that this season. Stanford Blood Center requires approximately 1,000 donors to come into its center each week to keep up with their standard level, but it averaged roughly 800 in June and July.

Donation centers like Stanford can import blood from other regions when it reaches critically low levels, but that has also proven to be challenging.

“Everyone is short, and it’s very difficult to find units that blood centers are willing to share because they’re so tight themselves,” Pandey said.

Long term, it’s likely that smaller blood drives will become more prevalent, particularly in the Bay Area, in addition to continued reliance on promotions, and therefore overhead, to increase participation at fixed location sites.

“The ability to do the big corporate blood drive will be dependent on how those businesses structure their return to work,” Pandey said. “Some of these big business drives that we had regularly partnered with may occur at a decreased frequency because of how work will be in the post-COVID world.”