“None of us has ever seen this magnitude of really, really sick women at one time,” said Dr. Akila Subramaniam, an associate professor at the University of Alabama’s Birmingham Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine. Subramaniam and her colleagues estimate a tripling — or even quadrupling — of pregnant patients hospitalized with Covid.
In North Carolina, Dr. Brenna Hughes, chief of the Duke University Medical Center’s Division of Maternal Fetal Medicine in Durham, said that her team is also treating more pregnant patients than at any point in the pandemic. At the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, the ICU has treated more than a dozen pregnant women with Covid in recent weeks, when it typically sees only one or two pregnant women a month.
