Timeline for Are pregnant women seven times more likely to die if they get Covid-19?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
19 events
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| Jan 22, 2023 at 2:22 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @gnasher729 Excellent point! The baseline risk for maternal mortality is 1 in 5000. The baseline risk for a person for the original strain of COVID for a person aged 25-40 is ~1 in 1000. So this alone should be responsible for a 5x increase in risks. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 17:49 | comment | added | gnasher729 | Was the risk for pregnant women higher than for non-pregnant women of the same age? Every activity has a risk X, and Covid has a risk Y, and you divide Y by X and say “if you do X then Covid increases your risk by Y/X + 1”. So it could be that if you are pregnant, you should get vaccinated. If you like red wine, you should be vaccinated. If you eat vegan or no vegetables at all. You should get vaccinated. If you usually drive drunk at excessive speed, no need to get vaccinated. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 16:28 | comment | added | JonathanReez | Thanks to @CJR I now understand that as per Table 3 - Maternal Deaths is 38/368 and 3/1122 for COVID and non COVID cohorts respectively. Then it's even more of a head scratcher as they claim a whooping 10% mortality rate from COVID? | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 14:14 | comment | added | JonathanReez | Thanks for the edit, I've retracted my previous comments. The one missing thing you could consider mentioning is selection bias - we cannot be sure if the women with a corona infection were actually picked at random, especially since people with more severe symptoms were also more likely to get tested. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 13:01 | comment | added | CJR | The paper you linked has the raw maternal mortality numbers in a table and it's 38/368 for COVID positive and 3/1122 for COVID negative controls. I don't know why you're all speculating that there were two observed deaths. The edit based on misinterpreting the abstract makes this answer inaccurate and significantly worse. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 11:52 | history | edited | quarague | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
more details on what the study does or doesn't claim
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| Jan 21, 2023 at 10:57 | comment | added | quarague | @JonathanReez No it's not a joke. If you have an event that you expect to see only in around 1 in 5000 cases and you see 2 in 1500 that suffices to conclude with 95% confidence that your expection is wrong. You can't be 100% certain or even 99% but they didn't claim that. If you expect an event to be extremely rare then observing it twice can be enough to conclude that your expectation is likely wrong. That is why studies use maths and statistics and not intuition which can fail badly in such situations. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 10:18 | comment | added | quarague | @JonathanReez a) Presumably there are not that many more women in the US that were pregnant and had a covid infection and b) The study did their math correctly. With n=1490 and 2 deaths you can exclude the null hypothesis of no effect due to Covid with 95% confidence (but not with say 99% confidence) but the estimated range of the size of the effect is huge (somewhere between 1.7 to 35 times worse with 95% confidence). As this is a meta study I suppose that is all the data there is. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 5:55 | comment | added | quarague | @JonathanReez Starting with 20 per 100.000 as a base rate, the study found a 7-fold increase so around 150 per 100.000 which corresponds to around 2 for their study size of n=1490. So my guess would be 2 deaths actually happened. Fits with the huge range of estimates for the size of the effect. | |
| Jan 20, 2023 at 18:13 | comment | added | gnasher729 | @EarlGrey I found numbers by race, with worst = 41 per 100,000 for black women, and best = 11 per 100,000 for hispanic women. | |
| Jan 20, 2023 at 13:59 | comment | added | Jack Aidley | @quarague: Yes, sorry I was referring to the claim in the MSN article, the paper is clear. | |
| Jan 20, 2023 at 13:57 | comment | added | quarague | @JackAidley The paper is about the sitation that given a pregnancy how do the risks change when comparing covid infection to no infection. The MSN article could have made that more clear. | |
| Jan 20, 2023 at 11:08 | comment | added | Jack Aidley | Perhaps it's just me, but I read the claim in that text as "pregnant women are seven times more likely to die of covid than non-pregnant women who get covid" rather than "pregnant women with covid are 7x more likely to die than pregnant women who don't get covid". | |
| Jan 19, 2023 at 14:11 | comment | added | EarlGrey | "around 20 per 100'000 birth. " This number is on par with Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia ... with a much more expensive health system data.worldbank.org/indicator/… | |
| Jan 19, 2023 at 6:39 | comment | added | quarague | @RobWatts I changed the first sentence. Afaik the study only talks about correlation. I think the number of deaths is (fortunately) way too small to take any more detailed conclusions like trying to look into causes. See also the huge convidence interval on how big the effect actually is. | |
| Jan 19, 2023 at 6:38 | history | edited | quarague | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
grammar fix
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| Jan 18, 2023 at 22:32 | comment | added | Rob Watts | I'm trying to think of a way that your first sentence could be improved to include some mention that the "SEVEN times" is only the preliminary number. I feel like people will fixate on that 7x, and if future research shows it as higher or lower people will panic or dismiss the research respectively. Also, does the research do anything to establish cause and effect? I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the increased pregnancy risk is because of risky behaviors that also led them to catch Covid. | |
| Jan 18, 2023 at 14:21 | vote | accept | Nigel J | ||
| Jan 18, 2023 at 14:01 | history | answered | quarague | CC BY-SA 4.0 |