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Pandemic poses short- and long-term risks to babies, especially boys
The pandemic has created a hostile environment for pregnant people and their babies. Stress levels among expectant mothers have soared.
Health
The pandemic has created a hostile environment for pregnant people and their babies.
Stress levels among expectant mothers have soared. Pregnant women with Covid are five times as likely as uninfected pregnant people to require intensive care and 22 times as likely to die. Infected moms are four times as likely to have a stillborn child.
Yet some of the pandemic’s greatest threats to infants’ health may not be apparent for years or even decades.
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That’s because babies of Covid-infected moms are 60 percent more likely to be born very prematurely, which increases the danger of infant mortality and long-term disabilities such as cerebral palsy, asthma and hearing loss, as well as a child’s risk of adult disease, including depression, anxiety, heart disease and kidney disease.
Studies have linked fever and infection during pregnancy to developmental and psychiatric conditions such as autism, depression and schizophrenia.
“Some of these conditions do not show up until middle childhood or early adult life, but they have their origins in fetal life,” said Dr. Evdokia Anagnostou, a neurologist and pediatrics professor at the University of Toronto.
For fetuses exposed to Covid, the greatest danger is usually not the coronavirus itself, but the mother’s immune system.
Both severe Covid infections and the strain of the pandemic can expose fetuses to harmful inflammation, which can occur when a mother’s immune system is fighting a virus or when stress hormones send nonstop alarm signals.
Prenatal inflammation “changes the way the brain develops and, depending on the timing of the infection, it can change the way the heart or kidneys develop,” Anagnostou said.
Although health officials have strongly recommended Covid vaccines for pregnant people, only 35 percent are fully vaccinated.