(Trinidad Express) Tobago has recorded at least five postpartum COVID-19 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.
This according to the Director in the Directorate of Women’s Health, Dr. Adesh Sirjusingh, who spoke at a COVID-19 news conference on Saturday, noting that the five deceased mothers had contracted the virus while pregnant. These women, he said. delivered successfully before succumbing to the disease.
“We’ve had as well in 2021, five women who died in the postpartum period, all of these women were delivered before they died, they had covid-19 during pregnancy. I can’t go into any details, but these were tragic circumstances,” said Sirjusingh.
addition, he said, there has been at least one case of child-death as a result of COVID-19 and four recorded cases of mother to child transmission. One of these cases, he said, was a still-birth.
Sirjusingh said that throughout the duration of the pandemic the country recorded 1154 cases of COVID-19 among the pregnant population, eight of which were recorded since the beginning of the new year.
“In 2020, we had 58 cases. In 2021 there were 1088. In the latter half of 2021, this is when the majority of cases occurred. To date we have had eight additional cases so the total number of pregnant women who have had covid-19 since the start of the pandemic is 1154,” he said,
With pregnancy being listed as a high-risk condition, he said, there are currently several cases of pregnant women who contracted COVID-10 and are currently in the parallel healthcare system, receiving Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and High Dependency Unit (HDU) level care.
Citing the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), he said pregnant women face a 70 per cent increased risk of death from COVID-19.
“Pregnancy is a high-risk condition of those persons two per cent were hospitalized in some form or fashion including going onto the HDU or the ICU…Pregnant women continue to make up a significant number of persons in the ICU’s across the globe. With a 70 percent increased risk of death and relatively small numbers of pregnant women taking up the vaccine,” said Sirjusingh.
To date, he added, 1021 women started their vaccination programs during pregnancy and 655 women completed this program during pregnancy.
