Maternal and neonatal outcomes of pregnant women with COVID-19 pneumonia: a case-control study

Na Li; Lefei Han; Min Peng; Yuxia Lv; Yin Ouyang; Kui Liu; Linli Yue; Qiannan Li; Guoqiang Sun; Lin Chen; Lin Yang

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03. 10.20033605 doi: medRxiv preprint As suggested by Favre et al, [19] vaginal delivery could be considered for the benefit of patients, when there is a labor room properly equipped for airborne precautions. All healthcare workers in close contacts should strictly adhere to contact and airborne precautions in addition to standard precautions. Similar to two previous reports of nine and one pregnant women with confirmed COVID-19 infection [7, 20] , we did not find any evidence to support the vertical transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from mother to fetus via placenta or during cesarean section. Our study also added some evidence to suggest that the risk of vertical transmission during vaginal delivery might also be trivial. There were two patients with vaginal delivery, one was two days before the onset of symptoms and another was during the course of illness. Neither of their newborns had respiratory systems after birth. Unfortunately, none of them gave us the consent to collect the respiratory specimens of their neonates. Given the small sample size of our study, the possibility of vertical transmission during vaginal delivery still cannot be ruled out.