NYC schools, students restarting critically-needed blood donation drives stalled by the COVID pandemic

Key Facts

Before the pandemic, whenever blood donations dipped, school blood drives served as a steady supply for the New York Blood Center, accounting for roughly a quarter of the center’s reserves and helping cultivate a lifelong habit of donating blood among teenage participants.
But that source ran dry during the pandemic as schools shuttered and moved to remote learning, and COVID-19 restrictions limited in-person gatherings at schools.
The Blood Center went from hosting 61 drives at city high schools between January and March 2019 that yielded more than 3,000 blood donations, to just three school-based drives for a total of 182 donations during the same period last year, according to the organization.
The shortage of banked blood has had critical short-term consequences for hospitals and health care providers who rely on donations for a range of medical procedures, and demand for blood is even higher now than at the start of the pandemic, according to Andrea Cefarelli, the executive director of the Blood Center.