By Dominic Taylor-
Covid-19 drove a dramatic increase in the number of women who died from pregnancy or childbirth complications in the US last year – a crisis that has disproportionately affected black and Hispanic women, according to a government report.
The report lays out grim trends across America for expectant mothers and their newborn babies.
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It finds that pregnancy-related deaths have spiked nearly 80% since 2018, with Covid-19 being a factor in a quarter of the 1,178 deaths reported last year.
The percentage of pre-term and low birthweight babies also went up last year, after holding steady for years.
Karen Tabb Dina, a maternal health researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said: “We were already in the middle of a crisis with maternal mortality in our country.
“This really shows that Covid-19 has exacerbated that crisis to rates that we, as a country, are not able to handle.”
The non-partisan US Government Accountability Office (GAO), which authored the report, analysed pregnancy-related deaths after US congress mandated that it review maternal health outcomes in the 2020 coronavirus relief bill.
The maternal death rate in the US is higher than many other developed nations and had been on the rise in the years leading up to the pandemic, but Covid-19 has only worsened conditions here for pregnant women.
Women who contract the virus while pregnant face elevated health risks. Staffing shortages and Covid-19 restrictions created more hurdles for expecting mothers to get in-person health care; and pandemic stress has intensified depression, a common condition during pregnancy.