The vast majority of babies born to COVID-19 positive moms do well in the first eight weeks of life.
Birthing a baby can be a nerve wracking experience. Having a child during the pandemic, potentially even more so. Will you get COVID-19? Is being in the hospital going to increase your risk of exposure to the virus? What about your baby-will he or she suffer badly if they contract the infection? If you are already infected, will your child be as well?
There are so many unknowns when it comes to dealing with the novel coronavirus. Researchers are slowly uncovering some of them, and thankfully when it comes to infants, the horizons are brighter than you might expect.
Milk
First, there is feeding. Breast milk has been found to be even more of a magical elixir than was already known. A new study out of China has shown mother’s milk can protect babies from falling sick with the coronavirus. This is even if the child does not have any antibodies to fight the virus. When healthy cells were mixed with breast milk and exposed to the novel coronavirus, amazingly, the milk stopped the virus from entering the cells, and from replicating. The effect was similar to ways in which breastmilk is known to protect infants from norovirus and bacterial infections.
But what if you are a mother who is not breastfeeding and who already has COVID-19? Is your child in true danger?
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Officials have gone back and forth on this one. At one point, experts were advising babies be temporarily separated from their mother if she was infected. This was at the time of their birth. Now, they have changed their minds. As of July 28, 2020, there were no published reports of cases in which an infant died soon after birth as a direct result of having the coronavirus. Most newborns (about 95%) did not have the virus at birth if mom did. Only about 5% seem to have contracted it around the time of delivery, and if they did, most often it was no big deal.
A Good Start
A study done at UC San Francisco found that babies born to COVID-19 infected mothers generally fared well in the first six to eight weeks after birth. Babies born to moms who had tested positive for COVID-19 up to two weeks prior to birthing their child did experience a higher rate of admission to neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Over the longer term, however, the infants did well. There were no cases of pneumonia or lower respiratory tract infections reported in their first eight weeks of life.
“The babies are doing well, and that’s wonderful,” said the study’s lead author Valerie J. Flaherman, an associate professor of pediatrics at UCSF. “When coronavirus first hit, there were so many strange and unfortunate issues tied to it…We didn’t know what to expect for the babies, so this is good news.”
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There are some caveats, however. Researchers have pointed out that the majority of births in the study involved mothers who got the novel coronavirus during their third trimester. Things could be different if the virus is contracted earlier but ultimately, this is still unknown. It is also true that mothers with COVID-19 have an increased risk of experiencing preterm birth.
The study was done as a part of a national project led by UCSF. Named PRIORITY, (Pregnancy Coronavirus Outcomes Registry), its goal is to follow pregnant women who may have the virus, in order to study how they and their baby fare over time.
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