COVID Pushes Maternal Mortality Up

 

Yesterday on The PediaBlog, Dr. Brian Donnelly informed us that the all-cause mortality rate in American children and teenagers has been increasing in the last few years. Fatal injuries suffered in car accidents, after drug overdoses, and from firearm-related suicides and homicides were cited as the main reasons for the increase.

Unfortunately, the bad news doesn’t stop there. In March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that the country’s maternal mortality rate — already higher than most developed nations in the world, as the graph above indicates — rose significantly in 2021 compared to years past:

In 2021, 1,205 women died of maternal causes in the United States compared with 861 in 2020 and 754 in 2019. The maternal mortality rate for 2021 was 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with a rate of 23.8 in 2020 and 20.1 in 2019.

 

Black women had a maternal mortality rate 2.6 times higher than White women in 2021. Maternal age was also a factor, with women over 40 having a mortality rate nearly 7 times higher than women under 25. Maternal deaths among Hispanic women were also higher.

Mike Stobbe says infections with SARS-CoV-2 help explain the spike in maternal deaths during the first two years of the pandemic:

What happened “isn’t that hard to explain,” said Eugene Declercq, a long-time maternal mortality researcher at Boston University. “The surge was COVID-related.”

Previous government analyses concluded that one quarter of maternal deaths in 2020 and 2021 were COVID-related — meaning that the entire increase in maternal deaths was due to coronavirus infections or the pandemic’s wider impact on health care. Pregnant women infected with the coronavirus were nearly 8 times as likely to die as their uninfected peers, according to a recent study published by BMJ Global Health.

 

Last year, as vaccines were more available and became the standard recommendation for pregnant women, maternal mortality rates dropped back to pre-pandemic levels. Joyce Frieden says that good news — “from the worst to the near worst” — is still not good enough:

However, although “the COVID‐19 pandemic had a dramatic and tragic effect on maternal death rates … we cannot let that fact obscure that there was — and still is — already a maternal mortality crisis to compound,” [American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) president] Hoskins continued. “Just as concerning are worsening racial health inequities and the fact that pregnant and postpartum Black people continue to make up a disproportionate number of maternal deaths at growing and alarming rates. This trend must be stopped.”

 

There remains a stubborn segment of the U.S. population that is ideologically opposed to COVID-19 vaccines. As long as COVID-19 sticks around and that skepticism persists, the virus will continue to threaten the lives of pregnant women and their offspring at rates too high to ignore.

 

(Google Images)

 

source https://www.thepediablog.com/2023/05/04/covid-pushes-maternal-mortality-up/