Pregnancy raises risk of COVID death
A study of more than 2,000 pregnant women from dozens of hospitals around the world has found that those with COVID-19 saw a significantly higher risk of death and of complications for themselves or their newborns.
The study, published Thursday in JAMA Pediatrics, underscores that pregnancy is a major risk factor for complications involving COVID-19 — one that should be considered alongside the likes of obesity and asthma.
The new report adds to a growing body of evidence “that will hopefully tip the scales towards more people getting vaccinated,” said Dr. Ilina Pluym, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at UCLA who wasn’t involved in the research.
Compared with pregnant women
who didn’t have COVID-19, those who did were 76 percent more likely to develop preeclampsia or eclampsia, the researchers found. They
were also more than three times as likely to develop a severe infection and five times as likely to be admitted to a hospital’s intensive care unit.
Strikingly, the risk of death was more than 22 times higher for the women with COVID-19.
The babies were at a disadvantage as well.
The risk of preterm birth was 59 percent higher for mothers with COVID-19, and the risk of a medically indicated preterm birth was nearly double. Compared with babies that weren’t born to COVID-19 patients, those who were faced a 2.66 times higher risk of severe illness after they were born and a 2.14 times higher risk of severe illness and death in the time just before and after birth.
For pregnant women, “it really seems that COVID increases the likelihood of having an adverse outcome,” said the study’s senior author, Dr. Aris Papageorghiou, a fetal medicine specialist at Oxford University.