This is shown by research by the Sanquin blood bank, which tests approximately two thousand blood donors for antibodies every week. Antibodies form the body’s natural defense against viral infections and ensure that the body recognizes the virus as an intruder and can clean it up.
Built-up immunity
At present, 21.1 percent of donors have antibodies in their blood. According to the blood bank, it provides a good picture of the built-up immunity among the Dutch.
“We think that for food and respiratory infections, donors are reasonably good for ordinary Dutch people,” says Sanquin’s medical microbiologist Hans Zaaijer in talk show Beau. “That means that 3 to 4 million of us just got it through.”
Zaaijer talked about it in the talk show Beau, in which he came up with three news items about antibodies. You can see it in the excerpt below.
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Brabant and Limburg are the leaders in built-up immunity with 26 percent. “That is still a bit of the carnival effect from the first wave,” says Zaaijer. The northern provinces are at 20 percent, the center of the country at 19. “But the difference between provinces is quickly made up. That is really fast.”
Healthcare workers
A striking fact from Sanquin’s samples is that female donors with 24 percent more often developed antibodies than men, with 16 percent. A possible cause for this is the division between men and women in care, according to further inquiries among donors.
It turns out that 30 percent of female donors work in health care, compared to 8 percent of men. Moreover, more of the female donors were found to work with corona patients (14 percent) than of the male donors (4 percent).
As a result, women are said to be more likely to contract corona and have already been vaccinated because of their profession as a care worker. The result: the production of antibodies.
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