Pregnancy and COVID-19

The New York Times recently released an article related to a CDC study with Prevention that found that studied 409,462 women ages 15 to 44, 23,434 of whom were pregnant, who tested positive for COVID-19 and were symptomatic.

Stephen Volin, MD, physician partner at the Women’s Health Group, highlights the following take home messages from this recent study:

• Like most young people infected by Covid-19, pregnant women tend not to get very sick when infected.
• For symptomatic pregnant patients, the survival rate is 99.85% rather than 99.88% in symptomatic non-pregnant women so there is an increased relative risk for pregnancy but only a very small absolute risk. The death rate is less than 2 per 1000, or 0.2%, whether pregnant or not.
• There is an elevated risk for premature delivery as well. The baseline risk is that about 10% of all pregnant women deliver before 37 weeks and in symptomatic women who are infected with COVID-19, their preterm delivery rate is up to 13%.  This is a significant increase but remember, 87% of pregnant women still deliver at term.