Babies born to mothers infected while pregnant have similar hospitalisation and mortality as unexposed kids.
Researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reassuring news for pandemic mums and bubs, after finding that children exposed to covid-19 in the womb had similar outcomes to their peers at six months.
The CDC-funded study, which was recently published in Pediatrics, followed 6600 American infants born in 2020 to women who had been infected with covid while pregnant.
Besides a very small increase in the proportion of infants with jaundice requiring phototherapy and a slight dip in the prevalence of breastfeeding initiation, the babies had similar all-cause mortality and hospitalisation rates as historical estimates.
In the subset where the mother had been infected in the fortnight before delivery, all-cause mortality was higher and breastfeeding initiation was lower.
Just 1% of the infants tested positive for covid in their first six months of life, the majority of those infections being detected in the late postnatal period.
Newborn and early postnatal covid testing was more likely to occur when women had tested positive for covid in the previous fortnight, whereas late postnatal testing was more common when an infant had symptoms, indicating potential bias in the data.
Despite these positive outcomes, the researchers warned that covid continued to pose a threat to infants via the impact of severe disease on mothers and the risk of preterm birth.
“Given a lack of vaccination and treatment options available to infants, strategies to prevent [covid] infection throughout pregnancy and postpartum should be implemented to reduce [covid] infections among infants as well as their gestational parents,” they wrote.
