Impact of COVID-19 on blood donation and transfusion services at Lusaka provincial blood transfusion centre Zambia

摘要

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), the cause of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), was first detected in Wuhan, Hubei Province in China [1]. On 31st December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) offices in China were notified of pneumonia of unknown cause [1,2]. Because of the way the disease was spreading, WHO described the outbreak as a Public Health Emergency of International concern on 30th January 2020. On 11th February 2020, WHO officially named it as Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and declared it a pandemic on 11th March 2020. By this time, there were more than 5.4 million COVID-19 cases in 185 countries with 345,000 deaths [1,3]. On 18th March, Zambia recorded its first 2 COVID-19 cases [4]. Since then, COVID-19 cases have continued increasing in Zambia [5].