Timeline for Are pregnant women seven times more likely to die if they get Covid-19?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 21, 2023 at 17:10 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @CJR yes that’s why the answer to some questions is… unknown. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 16:55 | comment | added | CJR | That's an argument with no bottom - we can't do studies at massive scale to answer every question, and we certainly can't do RCTs for pregnancy. Statistics is only useful when you have an imperfect understanding of the underlying data, otherwise it's wildly inferior to direct observation. Again, why I think this is a stats question. (This paper also does a good job showing the uncertainty around that 7x estimate IMO) | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 16:49 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @CJR I’d argue that if the 7x claim is about the general population then the meta study doesn’t have any data because it clearly didn’t include studies that sampled people at random, given the high mortality rate. If it’s about women with pre existing conditions then yes, it can be valid data, though we need to dig deeper into what those conditions were. Statistics is only useful once you have a good understanding of the underlying data | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 16:46 | comment | added | CJR | It's not a "this study is garbage" situation though, it's a "I would probably have made a few relatively minor changes to the methods" situation (I'd have probably excluded on collection date too), and the maternal mortality estimate is a very small part of the result anyway. It's more of a stats opinion and would fit better there. The core question here is supported by this published result. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 16:43 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @CJR questioning the quality of published studies is surely not out of scope here. We don’t take anything at face value :-) | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 16:38 | comment | added | CJR | This study calculated relative risk at 7x so it's most likely theres one or two very poor studies with denominator problems. But that's what meta-analysis is for, aggregating studies to get better estimates. There may have been additional exclusion criteria that would be useful but that's out of scope here IMO. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 16:29 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @CJR Okay, then looks like this metastudy is even worse than I've thought, as the people in the cohort had an insane 10% mortality rate from the virus vs. a 0.1% mortality rate for women under the age of 40. Garbage in, garbage out. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 15:56 | comment | added | CJR | Table 3 - Maternal Deaths is 38/368 and 3/1122 for COVID and non COVID cohorts respectively (a better question would be what is the quality of the underlying studies and if they're stratified but that reanalysis is out of scope here IMO) | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 15:55 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @CJR where did you see the 38/3 deaths in that paper? If you provide an exact quote I'll delete my answer - quarague claims that there have only been 2 deaths during the study. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 15:52 | comment | added | CJR | The other study had 38 deaths in the COVID cohort and 3 deaths in the non COVID cohort. You again misinterpreted the abstract because of your misunderstanding of the proper base rate. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 15:50 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @CJR yes, a control-matched study would be ideal, however no such studies have been performed with a sufficient number of participants, so we don't have a good answer to this question. The other answer talks about a study that extrapolated the mortality rate based on a grand total of 2 deaths. So the real answer is: inconclusive. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 15:37 | comment | added | CJR | You don't have any idea what the number of infections is, COVID infections in 2020 were between 5-10% of the population and we were protecting vulnerable populations with NPIs. There is a reason that you need to do control-matched studies for this and that you can't extrapolate off the base mortality rate. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 14:20 | comment | added | JonathanReez | @CJR there is no math in the answer, except showing that the maternal mortality rate increased by 18% in 2020 compared to 2019. What the answer does show is that there wasn't a massive increase in maternal fatality during 2020 despite a large number of infections. And 0.2/1000 is the baseline mortality rate - COVID would definitely increase it somewhat but we don't have numbers to prove by how much. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 14:16 | comment | added | CJR | The pre-vaccine COVID infection fatality rate in the childbearing age cohort was approximately 1/1000. 7x higher risk would be 0.7%. If the COVID IFR for pregnant women was 0.2/1000, pregnancy would be protective against COVID. Using the base maternal mortality rate is incorrect as the comparison is COVID deaths in pregnant vs not pregnant. The speculative math in this answer is therefore entirely incorrect. | |
| Jan 21, 2023 at 11:57 | comment | added | quarague | If you account for the fact that other industrialized countries have a maternal mortality of around 5, other countries much poorer than the US manage values around 20 and these numbers have been decreasing globally for decades, a 15% increase is exceptionally bad, even more so if it happens 2 years in a row. Somewhere the US health care system is failing badly in its maternal care and whatever the reason is, it seems to be getting worse. This is probably unrelated to corona though. | |
| Jan 20, 2023 at 18:44 | history | answered | JonathanReez | CC BY-SA 4.0 |