PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) -- Months into the pandemic, researchers are learning a lot more about the coronavirus and how it affects pregnant women and their babies.
Women who contract COVID-19 and have a mild case do as well during pregnancy as women who have not been infected with the coronavirus, according to Dr. Justin Brandt, maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
However, he says, others have a far different experience.
"Women who had severe COVID-19 and women who had critical disease did substantially worse compared to pregnant women who did not have COVID-19," he said. "We identified the clear risk factors for the severe and critical disease: advanced maternal age, obesity, Black and Hispanic race, and women who had medical problems like diabetes and chronic hypertension."
In addition, those women were at higher risk of pregnancy-related issues.
"These are patients who are more likely to have complications during labor due to abnormalities of the fetal heart rate tracing. They may need to have a C-section for fetal distress. The big risk when that occurs at an early gestation, there's a lot of medical problems for babies associated with prematurity, being born too soon."
He said more than 60% of the women in the study with mild cases of COVID-19 were asymptomatic. The rest had cough, fever and muscle aches. All the women with severe and critical disease required supplemental oxygen, and several required other medical interventions.