When reading this blog, I was first wondering what spleen was, and I needed to refer to a dictionary to get its French equivalent. Of course I knew the existence of the French term. I nevertheless ignored how to say this in English, and I moreover had no idea about the role of the spleen in our body. I am quite ignorant on this matter ;)
What amazed me most is how other organs take over when it is removed. The body is finally quite well done... Now my question to your post: do you have some numbers about COVID deaths among people with their spleen removed? One of the references you shared says that there is no higher risk of infection, but that there may be a higher risk of a severe form of the disease. That does not sound too critical, IMO. Any thoughts?
Well, I only know of one patient whose spleen was removed last year. Though he died this year.
The problem is, people that doesn't have spleen are rare to find. You only see them once in a while. But the problem about removing spleen is that the body cannot fully fight against infection like it use to.
I see. It is thus hard to get quantitative estimates just because of statistics.
I didn't check carefully the study above concerning the amount of individuals in the test samples. We are indeed discussing hundreds of people, which leads to a large statistical uncertainty. In other words, statistics make it quite hard to conclude in one way or the other, which is probably why the authors have used the conditional tense in their abstract.
Thanks for coming back to me. Cheers!