Pregnant with coronavirus: Risks are greater, and one Idaho mom has lingering symptoms
For Amelia Cortez, not being able to hold her newborn baby was one of the hardest struggles of having the coronavirus when she went through labor.
Cortez gave birth to her daughter, Seven, on May 21, just one day after she checked herself into St. Luke’s as she struggled to breathe. She had been tested for the virus on May 20 because she was symptomatic, but by that evening she needed to go to the emergency room.
Within 10 minutes of being at the ER, her water broke. Cortez knew she’d have to be separated from the baby so as not to infect the newborn girl.
“I gave birth to Seven and my doctor held up her and she said, ‘We’ve got to take her,’” said Cortez, of Garden City.
Cortez spent the next three weeks in the hospital with complications from COVID-19 and pneumonia. At age 25, she was on a ventilator and needed oxygen to survive.
Cortez is one of the 20 to 30 cases of women who were actively COVID-19-positive when they delivered a baby in the St. Luke’s Health System this year.
As of Nov. 4, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare showed 203 COVID-19 cases that have pregnancy documented in the data file among the 18,971 women of age 15-44 who have had the virus. As of Nov. 4, that would be 1.1% of the cases for women of childbearing age, according to IDHW spokesperson Niki Forbing-Orr.
St. Luke’s Dr. Lauren Miller said she expects that number is grossly underreported, because in the information that’s provided to the state, sometimes neither the “pregnant” or “not pregnant” box is checked. In her health system alone, she estimated that there have been “several hundred” women test positive at some point during their pregnancy.
As of Nov. 13, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had documented 38,071 cases nationwide of pregnant women contracting COVID-19. Of those, 51 have died.
Cortez experienced severe body aches, delusions or hallucinations, and serious breathing problems. She still has to use an oxygen tank about 90% of the time.
Cortez’s daughter was released from the hospital and Cortez’s mother took care of the child while she was still hospitalized. The first time she held her daughter was on June 8, after finally being released.
Cortez, who participated in Gov. Brad Little’s press conference last week, said she’s grateful to have recovered, and is especially thankful that Seven never contracted coronavirus.
“She’s healthy,” Cortez said. “She’s a great little baby.”
Risks with coronavirus and pregnancy
Dr. Miller said women who are pregnant with the virus are at an increased risk of needing intensive care, especially in the third trimester. Miller’s specialty is maternal fetal medicine.
“We’ve had very few cases actually need to go to the ICU” Miller said. “We’ve not had huge numbers here, but unfortunately we have had a handful of women need to be hospitalized due to their symptoms, the majority of which have been prior to their delivery. They haven’t been at the time of delivery and needed to be separated from their baby.”
But Miller said it’s important that women know they are at an increased risk simply by being pregnant. In the later stages of a normal pregnancy, shortness of breath can be a common symptom, and COVID-19 only exacerbates that.
“Part of the physiology of pregnancy, and why they may get sicker with the flu, for example, is because they are already having some respiratory compromise,” Miller said. “It certainly places women at a higher risk of becoming hypoxic very quickly. So they can be fine, fine, fine — not fine very quickly. Whereas people who are not pregnant can compensate for that shortness of breath.”
The good news is that if a pregnant woman has the virus, it generally does not transmit to the unborn child. Miller said there have been very few cases of transmission from the mother to the baby. Additionally, there does not yet appear to be any adverse outcome for the babies.
Miller said she did not know of any transmission from mother to baby in the St. Luke’s Health System. She said it’s important for pregnant women to be especially cautious after 37 weeks of pregnancy.
The CDC reported that pregnant women between the ages of 35–44 with COVID-19 were nearly four times as likely to require invasive ventilation and twice as likely to die than were nonpregnant women of the same age.
The CDC also reported that the coronavirus has a disproportionate impact on pregnant women who are Black or Latina.
According to the CDC report, “Among symptomatic pregnant women with COVID-19 for whom race/ethnicity was reported, 30% were Hispanic and 24% were White, differing from the overall reported racial/ethnic distribution of women who gave birth in 2019 (24% Hispanic and 51% White).”
The Idaho Statesman requested the racial breakdown of COVID-19-positive pregnant women from Health and Welfare, but the information was not immediately available on Friday.
Pregnant women in custody
For women in the custody of the Idaho Department of Correction and county jails, coronavirus outbreaks have been a concern.
According to IDOC, the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center has had 10 pregnant women incarcerated since March. One of those was diagnosed with COVID-19 while pregnant.
The South Boise Women’s Correctional Center has had five pregnancies since March, and three of them have tested positive.
As of Nov. 6, four women in IDOC custody were pregnant and two of them contracted COVID-19, according to IDOC spokesman Jeff Ray.
“The (pregnant) women are housed in units that are reserved for people with health conditions that make them more vulnerable to COVID-19 than other members of a facility’s population,” Ray said in an email to the Statesman.
Sarah Kjar is a former inmate at both women’s prisons and was released from custody on Oct. 14 after completing her programming. She was first taken into custody on March 5 in Bonneville County.
Kjar, 25, of Idaho Falls, told the Statesman in an interview that the pregnant women in the prisons were especially concerned.
“They were scared of getting it, not only for themselves but for their unborn child,” she said.
Kjar said they did isolate the pregnant women with the vulnerable population, but they did have to use portable toilets and portable showers.
“It’s hard feeling that ultimately our lives really don’t matter,” Kjar said. “You don’t want to feel like you’re not cared about, especially in a pandemic.”
On Nov. 12, the Ada County Jail reported having 12 pregnant women in its custody, out of about 900 inmates, but none of them had tested positive for the coronavirus.
“We do not take any additional precautions for pregnant inmates, because we take as many precautions as possible with all our inmates,” said sheriff’s spokesman Patrick Orr in an email. “Every new inmate gets a COVID-19 test within four days of getting into custody. If we get a positive test in a living area like a dorm, we might need to find other housing for that inmate and then determine how much testing we need to do for everyone in that dorm — like if any of the inmates are in a group with a higher vulnerability to COVID-19.”
In April, the first female federal inmate to die of the virus was pregnant: Andrea Circle Bear, a 30-year-old from Eagle Butte, South Dakota, according to a news release from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Her baby survived after being delivered by emergency cesarean section.
Circle Bear was being housed at a prison in in Fort Worth, Texas, according to the Rapid City Journal. She was taken to the hospital and placed on a ventilator, and her baby was delivered on April 1. She later died.
As of Wednesday morning, none of Idaho’s female inmates had died of coronavirus-related causes.
This story was originally published November 22, 2020 at 6:30 AM with the headline "Pregnant with coronavirus: Risks are greater, and one Idaho mom has lingering symptoms."
