Medics: Three Pregnant Women With COVID-19 Died In Two Weeks In Minsk

The children were saved.

In two weeks in Minsk, three pregnant women who were lying in one of the hospitals of the capital have died. This was reported to zerkalo.io by several unrelated sources in medical circles. According to them, everything happened between October 11 and 24. The interlocutors point out: the women had COVID-19. The Ministry of Health has not yet commented on the situation.

"All of the women who died were young, 27-30 years old, and were in the intensive care unit of a maternity hospital. All of them had COVID19 and had had a severe course of disease," said one of the doctors.

The information on the three dead women is confirmed by another doctor. The doctor's colleague specifies: one of the girls was recently transferred to the Center of surgery, transplantology and hematology and was put on the Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation unit, which is necessary for heavy patients, who do not receive any help from the ventilator.

The children were saved.

An acquaintance of one of the women said that her pregnant friend was hospitalized in early October. She had coronavirus and her lungs were more than half infected.

"After a few days, it got much worse. They put her on life support, but they couldn't save her," says her friend. "My friend was operated by cesarean section. The girl was born small but healthy".

Minsk is not the only city where deaths of pregnant women with COVID-19 are reported. A resident of Homel also reported the tragedy in the family to Radio Svaboda. According to the woman, her daughter, who was six months pregnant at the time, was diagnosed with coronavirus at the end of September. When the patient was transferred to an intensive care unit of a city hospital on September 29, 40% of her lungs were affected.

"They changed [oxygen] masks daily, but she only felt worse. She was given IV fluids for ten hour. What kind exactly? No one said. In the morning of October 8, she sent [us] a picture of her in a mask and wrote: "The last day". I don't know what she meant by that," the publication quotes the woman's mother as saying.

That day, the mother says, she kept calling the emergency room, but was told that all the doctors were busy.

"They said, 'Call back later.' I called every hour. When I finally got through in the evening, the doctor said that my daughter had been very nervous and was tearing off her mask, so they gave her a sleeping pill and took the mask off. After that she suffered a massive stroke, she was put on a life support, and on October 12 she died," the woman recounts and says: a few days before the tragedy, her daughter underwent another CT scan. The CT scan showed that 85 percent of her lungs were affected.

The woman had three children.

Journalists asked the press service of the Ministry of Health to clarify whether they had received any information about deaths of pregnant women with COVID-19, but they have not yet received a reply.

"The third trimester is a risk factor for all pregnant women."

A Minsk obstetrician-gynecologist is wary of the Ministry of Health's statistics on maternal mortality. He says it is hard to imagine that given the capabilities of our medicine, these data may be at the level of, for example, Japan. And he, as well as specialists of the Ministry of Health, believes that pregnant women should be vaccinated against coronavirus.

"For nowadays everyone, including the young ones, gets sick severely," says the doctor.

Does pregnancy affect the course of coronavirus?

According to the specialist, if a pregnant woman has a risk factor for severe course of COVID-19, say, a chronic disease, the chance that she will have a more severe course of coronavirus is higher than that of a non-pregnant woman with the same disease. In the case of a healthy pregnant woman, the situation is different. During the 1-2 trimesters there is no fundamental difference in the course of COVID-19 between pregnant and non-pregnant women.

"But the third trimester, according to the latest European data that I read, is a risk factor for all pregnant women. Especially if the woman also has other risk factors, such as obesity," explains the interlocutor.

Why does this happen?

"There are many reasons for this," the obstetrician-gynecologist points out and discusses some of them. "During pregnancy there is a heavy load on the heart and all systems, especially by the third trimester. [By the third trimester] the uterus takes up almost the entire volume of the abdomen, so the woman already has certain difficulties with normal breathing. Plus the hemostasis changes a lot. What does this mean? During pregnancy, the body prepares itself for severe blood loss. Accordingly, thrombogenesis increases, so spontaneous thrombosis is a separate risk factor for pregnant women. Coronavirus also gives a high risk of thrombosis. As a result, one thing adds up to another. The volume of circulating blood almost doubles.

- Does it make a difference at what stage of pregnancy to get vaccinated?

- It would be ideal to get vaccinated before pregnancy, but since in my opinion the vaccination campaign against COVID-19 has failed, it is important to just get vaccinated, says the interlocutor. - The age of the woman does not matter.

We should note that in Belarus, vaccination of pregnant women against coronavirus began in September. Experts recommend the Vero Cell vaccine for vaccination (this is what the WHO says about it).

- A pregnant woman takes the decision to vaccinate herself after being fully informed by an obstetrician-gynecologist (therapist in the antenatal clinic) about the course of the disease, the risk of complications, as well as the benefits and possible complications of vaccination, - the Ministry of Health previously explained.