“If you love this baby, please go get the vaccine” against COVID

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida – Dr Sunil D. Kumar said on Tuesday that the coronavirus pandemic has dominated his life for over a year. This latest surge in COVID-19 cases in Broward County, he said, has been the worst of all, as he’s dealing with young people – including young pregnant women.

Maternal and fetal medicine specialist Dr Adolfo Gonzalez-Garcia agrees with Kumar. The high-risk obstetrician has been treating patients at Broward Health Medical Center for 17 years. He said symptomatic cases of COVID-19 in the past three months have increased “dramatically”.

Kumar and Gonzalez-Garcia were among doctors at Broward Health Medical Center who were devastated when an unvaccinated woman recently died of complications from COVID-19 after giving birth to a baby boy. They believe her death was preventable had she been vaccinated against COVID.

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“This baby will never know his mother and this woman has never seen her child and it is so, so sad and it should never happen,” Gonzalez-Garcia said at a press conference Tuesday in Coral Springs. .

Kumar, chief of staff and medical director of the intensive care unit at Broward Health Medical Center, said the condition of some new, unvaccinated mothers deteriorated immediately after giving birth.

“Not being able to hold this baby and not being able to see this baby for days and weeks, it’s really unfortunate and it’s preventable… please go get vaccinated… if the mom is vaccinated, the antibodies can be passed on to the baby, ”said Kumar, who specializes in critical care medicine and lung medicine.

Message from Kumar to pregnant women: “If for no other reason, if you love this baby, please go and get the vaccine.

During pregnancy, women don’t have the ability to breathe that adults who aren’t pregnant have, so when COVID hurts the lungs it can get “really bad, really quickly,” Gonzalez-Garcia said.

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“What surprises me most is the number of pregnant women, not in labor, who are only 20, 25, 30 weeks pregnant, and they show up … check their oxygen levels, they are super low, something that neither the mother nor the fetus can take very well, ”said Gonzalez-Garcia.

Dr Joshua D. Lenchus, regional chief medical officer at Broward Health Medical Center, said the two largest organizations dealing with pregnant women, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, agreed with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that teens and women who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or trying to get pregnant should be vaccinated against COVID-19.

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Despite this, Lenchus said about one in four pregnant women have been vaccinated, so the other three who are not vaccinated face an almost three times higher chance of being hospitalized due to COVID-19. .

“The benefit of vaccination far outweighs the risk,” Lenchus said.

Obstetrician Dr. Mary-Beatrice Squire said she saw young pregnant women who should have come home with their babies, but didn’t because they couldn’t recover from COVID -19. She said she saw their health deteriorate at the hospital, as they were diagnosed with pneumonia and respiratory failure. It is “very frightening” to witness the “current frequency” that women need a ventilator and intensive care admission, she said.

“Women are very smart and they are very concerned about anything that they can put into their bodies during pregnancy. I see them quitting cold turkey. I see them change their diet, their exercise, a lot of the things they changed in their lifestyle to protect themselves, and their babies to have a safe pregnancy and delivery, ”Squire said. “Unfortunately, when not vaccinated, not all steps have been taken to prevent COVID-19 and its serious effects and complications.”

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