Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Resulted in Reduced Prenatal Visits?

Prenatal visits are found to be lowered with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic as per a study at the Georgia Tech's School of Economics, published in the journal Pediatrics. The study for the first time examined the pandemic-era birth data at scale. "While much more research needs to be done, including understanding how these changes affected fetal deaths and how doctors triaged patient care by risk category during the pandemic, these are significant findings that should spark discussion in the medical community," says Assistant Professor and lead author of the paper, Daniel Dench.

The team examined records of nearly 39 million U.S. births from 2010 to 2020, from the National Center for Health Statistics to forecast expected premature births — defined as babies born before 37 weeks of pregnancy — from March to December 2020.

It was found that preterm births from C-sections or induced deliveries had an immediate drastic fall by 0.4 percentage points in March 2020, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 as a pandemic.

"It's really about, how does this affect fetal health? Did doctors miss some false positives — did they just not deliver the babies that would have survived anyway? Or did they miss some babies that would die in the womb without intervention?" "This is just the start of what I think will be an important line of research," says Dench.

Source-Medindia