Liu F, Nguyen M, Vijayakumar P, Kaplan A, Meir A, Dai Y, Wang E, Walsh H, Ring AM, Omer SB, Farhadian SF. Newborn Dried Blood Spots for Serologic Surveys of COVID-19. Pediatr Infect Dis J. 2020 Dec;39(12):e454-e456. doi: 10.1097/INF.0000000000002918. PMID: 33105339; PMCID: PMC7654948.

There is an urgent need for inexpensive, population-wide surveillance testing for COVID-19. We tested newborn dried blood spot (DBS) anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies for all infants born at Yale from March to May 2020, and found that newborn DBS serologies reflect maternal and population-wide infection rates during the study period. This suggests a role for DBS in COVID-19 surveillance in areas where viral testing is limited.