A recent study found that pregnant women with COVID-19 were at increased risk for stillbirth, compared with pregnant women without COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
CDC used the Premier Healthcare Database Special COVID-19 Release (PHD-SR), a large hospital-based administrative database, to assess whether a maternal COVID-19 diagnosis documented at hospital delivery was associated with stillbirth during March 2020-September 2021, as well as before and during the period of Delta variant predominance in the United States (March 2020-June 2021 and July-September 2021, respectively).
Among 1,249,634 deliveries during March 2020-September 2021, stillbirths were rare (8,154; 0.65%): 273 (1.26%), occurred among 21,653 deliveries to women with COVID-19 documented when delivery occurred at the hospitalization, and 7,881 (0.64%) occurred among 1,227,981 deliveries without COVID-19.
Among the cases in the analysis, 53.7% of women were non-Hispanic White, and 50.6% had private insurance as the primary payer. Overall,15.4% had obesity, 11.2% had diabetes, 17.2% had a hypertensive disorder, 1.8% had a multiple-gestation pregnancy, and 4.9% had smoking (tobacco) documented on the delivery hospitalization record. Overall, 21,653 (1.73%) of delivery hospitalizations had COVID-19 documented.
