A sweeping new study finds pregnancy-related complications -- such as hypertension, postpartum bleeding and maternal death -- increased during COVID:
WBUR spoke with the study’s senior author, Dr. Jose Figueroa, an assistant professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital.Your research looked at pregnancy and birth outcomes before and during the COVID pandemic. What did you find?
"The rate of maternal death in this study went up slightly. In a country in which we think we have a pretty good health care system, the fact that that happened is highly, highly concerning — especially as we think about 'how could we prevent this from happening again?'""Routine obstetric outpatient care was just completely disrupted during the pandemic.
"And we cannot overstate how bad the pandemic was on the lives of individuals as a stressor. The risk of these pregnancy-related complications are increased in times of high stress.""It was quite small. Of the 805,324 pregnant people in the pandemic period, 318 of them had confirmed COVID during hospitalization. So this is less than 0.1%.
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