The Corona epidemic caused a significant increase in the number of women who died from complications of pregnancy or childbirth in the United States last year, a crisis that claimed the lives of the majority of black and Latina women, according to a government report issued on Wednesday.
The report identifies bleak trends across the United States for expectant mothers and their newborns.
The report found that pregnancy-related deaths have risen by nearly 80 percent since 2018, and the coronavirus pandemic was a factor in a quarter of the 1,178 deaths reported last year.
The proportion of premature and low-birth-weight babies also increased last year, following being stable for years. More women who are pregnant or postpartum report symptoms of depression.
“We were really in the middle of a crisis with maternal deaths in our country,” said Karen Tab-Dina, a maternal health researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She added, “This really shows that the Corona epidemic has exacerbated that crisis to rates that we, as a country, cannot deal with.”
The nonpartisan US Government Accountability Office, which wrote the report, analyzed pregnancy-related deaths following Congress tasked it with reviewing maternal health findings in the 2020 coronavirus relief bill.
The maternal mortality rate in the United States is higher than that of many other developed countries, and was on the rise in the years leading up to the pandemic, but the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened conditions for pregnant women.
Women infected with coronavirus during pregnancy face high health risks. Staff shortages and restrictions imposed by the novel coronavirus have created further obstacles to mothers’ access to personal health care; Epidemic stress has exacerbated depression, a common condition during pregnancy.
Tab Dina said mental health issues likely contributed to the increase in pregnancy-related deaths. Many women who experience depression and anxiety during or following pregnancy have trouble getting the care they need.
“Mental health is the biggest pregnancy complication that we don’t understand,” Tab Dina added.
The biggest spike in deaths came from July to December of last year, when the delta variant infected millions of people, said Carolyn Yucomb, director of the Government Accountability Office.
“It’s really clear from the data that the time in which the delta variant spread seems to correspond to a massive increase in mortality,” Yucom added.
Pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 live births rose from 44 in 2019 to 68.9 among black women last year. The death rate for white women was 26.1 last year, a jump from 17.9 recorded in 2019.
Hispanic death rates have been declining, but have ballooned once more during the pandemic, from 12.6 per 100,000 in 2019 to 27.5 last year.
And the high death rates among blacks and Latinos due to the emerging corona virus, is partly due to their lack of access to medical care, and they often work in essential jobs that expose them to the virus.
Long before the outbreak of coronavirus, the arena was set for black, low-income, and rural women to receive substandard pregnancy care, putting them at greater risk of miscarriage, according to a separate report from the Government Accountability Office.
Hospitals are abandoning obstetric services in rural, low-income and most black communities, the report said.
The review found that more than half of rural counties did not have a hospital providing pregnancy care as of 2018.
The report found that “loss of hospital obstetric services in rural areas is associated with increased out-of-hospital and preterm births, which may contribute to poor maternal and infant health outcomes.”
