According to a federal assessment made public on Wednesday, COVID-19 was to blame for a dramatic increase in the number of women who died in the United States last year from pregnancy- or childbirth-related complications.
According to the report, there are gloomy nationwide trends for expectant mothers and their newborn infants.
The study found that pregnancy-related deaths have increased by roughly 80% during 2018, with COVID-19 being a cause in 25% of the 1,178 deaths recorded in 2018. In 2017, the proportion of preterm and low birthweight babies increased after years of stability. Additionally, more women who are expecting or just gave birth are expressing depression symptoms.
‘We were already in the middle of a crisis with maternal mortality in our country,’ said Karen Tabb Dina, a maternal health researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ‘This really shows that COVID-19 has exacerbated that crisis to rates that we, as a country, are not able to handle.’
The report was written by the neutral US Government Accountability Office after Congress asked it to review maternal health outcomes in the 2020 coronavirus relief bill. It looked at pregnancy-related mortality.
COVID-19 has only made matters more difficult for expectant mothers in this country, despite the fact that the United States has a higher maternal mortality rate than many other wealthy nations, and that it had been increasing in the years before the epidemic.
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