With growing concerns about social gatherings due to the novel coronavirus, blood donation events around Iowa have been cancelled. Early predictions from the Mississippi Valley Regional Blood Center say over 3,000 blood donations will be lost by the end of March. Manager of Public Relations Kirby Winn tells KCII News their supply of blood is stable and will continue to do their best to keep a steady supply of blood coming in, “In all of our lifetimes, this is kind of a new event. It may be that the status quo remains or it may be that there are high rates of illness and infection that would really impact the availability of healthy people to come out and give blood. What we’re concerned with now is having very strong collections and essentially building up our supply so we can ride out whatever may be to come. We don’t know. The situation is a little bit hard to predict. I would say we are taking lots of measures to avoid widespread infection and to flatten the curve as we’ve seen from those charts from public health. It’s our job to stay ahead of it because we never want to be in a position of having a true blood shortage where someone who needs a blood transfusion would be unable to get it. We’re not there now, and we don’t want to get there.” 

Winn suggests healthy individuals who want to donate can participate in the mobile clinics that have not been cancelled, or visit donation centers located in Burlington or Coralville. Washington will have a mobile blood drive on April 9th at the Knights of Columbus Main Meeting Room from 1:30-6:30 p.m. Individuals can register online at the Mississippi Valley Blood Center or call blood drive coordinator Ron Anderson.