Fourteen per cent decrease in live births in Europe nine months after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and first lockdowns, researchers report
Europe saw a 14% decrease in live births in January 2021, just nine to ten months after the first peak of the COVID-19 epidemic and the first lockdowns, compared to the average numbers of live births in January 2018 and 2019.
The researchers of the study, which is published today (Friday) in Human Reproduction [1], one of the world’s leading reproductive medicine journals, say that the decrease may be associated with the lockdowns imposed in many European countries rather than to people becoming infected with COVID-19 and encountering problems as a result of infection, such as deaths, miscarriages or still births. For this to be the case, there would have been a drop in live births just a few weeks or months after exposure to COVID-19, which they did not observe
First author of the study, Dr Léo Pomar, a midwife sonographer at Lausanne University Hospital and associate professor at the School of Health Sciences in Lausanne, Switzerland, said: “The decline in births nine months after the start of the pandemic appears to be more common in countries where health systems were struggling and capacity in hospitals was exceeded. This led to lockdowns and social distancing measures to try to contain the pandemic.
“The longer the lockdowns the fewer pregnancies occurred in this period, even in countries not severely affected by the pandemic. We think that couples’ fears of a health and social crisis at the time of the first wave of COVID-19 contributed to the decrease in live births nine months later.”
Previous pandemics in the 20th and 21st centuries, such as the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and the 2013 Ebola and 2016 Zika virus outbreaks were associated with a decline in birth rates nine months after their peaks. The reasons were the high death rates in parents for the first two pandemics and high foetal death rates as a result of direct exposure to Zika. The desire of couples to postpone pregnancy in a time of crisis also played a role. The researchers of the current study wondered whether a similar trend would be seen after the COVID-19 pandemic.
They looked at data from 24 European countries [2] for the periods immediately before and after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. They adjusted the live birth rates to take account of seasonal variations and found that January 2021 was the only month in which there was a significant drop in live births.
Source: Read Full Article