Dr. Coye on Pregnancy and COVID-19

Marcelo Coye

In COVID-19 news, a total of eleven pregnant women have died since the beginning of 2021, with the latest death on Friday. Five of those deaths are due to COVID-19. This is compared to 2020, when two pregnant women died due to COVID-19 complications, showing just how deadly the Delta variant is. On a slightly positive note, while just over four hundred pregnant women have contracted COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic, most have recovered and had mild symptoms. So what makes pregnant women particularly vulnerable to developing severe symptoms of COVID-19?  Dr. Marcelo Coye sought to give an explanation this morning on Open Your Eyes Morning Show.

Dr. Marcelo Coye, Gynecologist/Obstetrician

“To begin with, a woman who is pregnant is at more risk. For one are the changes in pregnancy, for example, the bigger the pregnancy the bigger the effect on the diaphragm. So, women already, normally without COVID, during the last three months have difficulties to breathe. They become short of breath very easily. Then, in pregnancy there is a slight immune deficiency, naturally, physiologically. The reason for that is that at the time of conception half of the genetic material is foreign to her, it is from the male person. So, there are some changes that decrease the immune-effectiveness, because it wants to make sure that you don’t reject that foreign material from the father. So, women already begins with a negative. Now, pregnant women don’t get it quicker than those who are not pregnant. But, if they get it they then run the same as everybody, eighty percent of them are asymptomatic and mild and nothing happens. But, when they do get into the severe, moderate and severe symptoms that are when we get into trouble, particularly in the third trimester. There they have problems because, one is that they already have compromises, and if you get pneumonia, the early part of the COVID-19 infection, it makes it worse you know. So, the third trimester there is increased risk to the mother.”