Blood Supply Interview

44 area health care facilities get their blood products from community blood center because our supporters and nobody else. So that's an important distinction. We're to be the local providers of blood to the area. The situation currently has it has been for the past several months. You know, the COVID-19 pandemic in March really knocked us for a loop. It started off with canceled blood drives as businesses were closing and then people working from home. Schools, we get 50% of our total blood that we collect from area high school and college students from those schools sat down. They impacted our ability to collect blood there. So in a large part, we've just been kind of limping through. The goodness was during the initial stages of the pandemic blood usage in our area hospitals was greatly reduced. So we were able to kind of dodgeable it there. But now with blood usage in hospitals rising. In fact, the blood usage levels are the highest they've been in three years in the last two back-to-back months. Our ability to collect more blood has continues to be hampered. We still have schools under various situations that

they're not able to hold a blood drive or not have the students there to generate the numbers that we had predicted. A whole blood drive is in the in the ways that we're used to. And so we're continuing to battle this kind of hand-to-mouth thing.