Pregnant women with Covid six times more at risk of being admitted to ICU, study finds

Pregnant women who catch Covid-19 are five times more likely to be hospitalised and six times more at risk of being admitted to intensive care, new research reveals today.

he study compares the severity of Covid-19 in more than 2,200 pregnant women and over 11,200 non-pregnant women of child-bearing age, infected with the virus at the same time.

The Canadian research is presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Lisbon, Portugal, and the findings are independent of key risk factors including age, underlying illnesses, vaccination status, and infecting variant.

It comes after a significant number of pregnant women with Covid-19 in Ireland were admitted to intensive care in the third and fourth waves. The number declined during the Omicron wave.

Twenty-three pregnant women here were admitted to intensive care between November 2020 and June 2021.Another 39 pregnant woman became seriously ill between June and December

From December up to late March two pregnant women here were admitted to intensive care.

The new study, presented to the congress today. shows that women were half as likely to be hospitalised after just one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, and even less likely with two or more doses.

Similarly, women were more than half as likely to be admitted to intensive care unit when they had one dose of the vaccine, and even less likely with two or more doses.

The time-matched cohort study by Kiera Murison and colleagues from the University of Toronto, which included information on more than 13,600 women from Ontario’s Case and Contact Management database, is unique because each pregnant woman affected by Covid-19 was compared to five non-pregnant women of reproductive age with Covid-19, matched by test date of positive infection.

The researchers say that the findings emphasise the importance of pregnant women getting vaccinated against Covid-19.

Pregnancy is associated with increased vulnerability to severe outcomes from infectious diseases, both for the mother and developing infant.

The Covid-19 pandemic may have important health consequences for pregnant women, who may also be more reluctant than non-pregnant people to accept vaccination.

To estimate the degree to which increased severity of Covid-19 outcomes can be attributed to pregnancy, researchers analysed data from a population-based Sars-CoV-2 case file from Ontario between March 16, 2020, and January 4, 2022, which holds records for over 1 million confirmed Covid-19 cases within the Canadian province of Ontario, which has a population over 14 million.

The authors of the observational study said: “These findings suggest that in otherwise healthy women, pregnancy itself seems to be a factor that increases illness severity, while among women with comorbidities it becomes one of several factors that augment risk.”

A separate study presented to the congress from the University of Bologna in Italy showed most women who catch Covid when pregnant pass on protective antibodies against illness from the virus to their unborn babies.