Fetal Deaths due to Covid-19
*Corresponding Author(s):
Leonard EvansScience Serving Society, 973 Satterlee Road, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48304, United States
Email:levanssss@gmail.com
Introduction
The more than 800,000 total deaths [1] from Covid-19 do not include another category of victim. Namely, unborn babies. The data used here covers the slightly more than 2-year period from 2020-01-01 to 2022-01-08. To calculate the number of fetuses killed I assume that if a female of childbearing age dies, her fetus also dies. While an approximation, I consider it adequate for the present calculations. A second assumption is that the probability of contracting covid-19 is the same for pregnant and non-pregnant women. I assume that the number of live births [2] in a year is an approximation for the number of women who are pregnant in that year times a factor of 9/12 to reflect that the duration of the pregnancy is 9 months compared to the 12-month data collection unit. The method of my estimate of the number of fetus deaths caused by maternal deaths (Table 1) parallels very closely our earlier estimate of the number of fetuses killed in US traffic crashes [3]. The calculation in table 1 estimates that Covid-19 has killed 471 fetuses.
|
A Female age (years) |
B Probability that woman gives birth [2] |
C Covid-19 deaths [1] |
D Col B x Col C |
E Fetus deaths Col D x [3] |
|
10-14 |
0.0002 |
60 |
0.01 |
0.01 |
|
15-17 |
0.0063 |
100 |
0.63 |
0.47 |
|
18-19 |
0.0288 |
127 |
3.66 |
2.74 |
|
20-24 |
0.0628 |
647 |
40.63 |
30.47 |
|
25-29 |
0.09 |
1,214 |
109.26 |
81.95 |
|
30-34 |
0.0948 |
2,310 |
218.99 |
164.24 |
|
35-39 |
0.0517 |
3,378 |
174.64 |
130.98 |
|
40-44 |
0.0118 |
5,298 |
62.52 |
46.89 |
|
45-54 |
0.0009 |
19,852 |
17.87 |
13.40 |
|
|
Totals |
628.21 |
471.15 |
Table 1: Female Covid-19 deaths and calculated fetus deaths.
References
- CDC (2022) Provisional COVID-19 Death Counts by Age in Years, 2020-2021. Cumulative deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) reported to NCHS by sex and age in years, in the United States. CDC, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
- National Vital Statistics System (2021) Births: Provisional Data for 2020. National Vital Statistics System, USA.
- Evans L, Redelmeier DA (2015) Traffic deaths before and after birth. Eur J Obstet Gynecol Reprod Biol 194: 258-259.
Citation: Evan L (2022) Fetal Deaths due to Covid-19. J Reprod Med Gynecol Obstet 7: 092.
Copyright: © 2022 Leonard Evans, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
