The COVID-19 pandemic made us adapt our data collection strategies. Because we could not fly to South Africa to implement our planned observational study design, we had to assess the South African blood supply chain based on expert interviews and document analyses. The first interview round is completed now, and we are analyzing the interviews and the documents we’ve got to model the blood supply chain of one South African province. We thank all the interviewees for participating in these interviews, and explaining the processes of the (South) African blood transfusion systems in such great detail. A blog post about our experiences with remote data collection can be found in the blog of ehealth Africa & Information Systems gGmbH.