Mumbai Woman Suffers Miscarriage Due To Covid-19 Says Study

Mumbai: In a first such case, a woman in mumbai suffers miscarriage due to Covid-19. As per the research paper submitted last week by the National Institute of Research in Reproductive Health (NIRRH)na research arm of the Indian Council of Medical Research in collaboration with ESIS (Employees’ State Insurance Scheme) hospital at Kandivali,says this is the first case demonstrating persistence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in a tissue weeks after clearance in the throat swabs. the virus not just survived in the tissue but is replicative in the placental cells,” stated a research paper.

The paper was posted on August 22 on MedRxiv, an online site that publishes pre-prints of medical and scientific papers.

The woman, a hospital security guard in her late twenties, tested positive for Covid-19 when she was two months pregnant. She was asymptomatic. Five weeks later, when she was in the 13th week of her pregnancy, her nasal swab test returned negative. But after her 13th week of pregnancy, when she went for a routine ultrasound test, the foetus was found to be dead.

Suspecting it to be linked with Covid-19, ESIS hospital approached the NIRRH to investigate further. The hospital’s ethics committee approved tests on the woman. “We first tested her nasopharyngeal for Covid-19 again, and it came negative. Then we tested the placenta, amniotic fluid and foetal membrane. We were surprised to find that five weeks after she got the infection, the virus was replicating in the placenta,” said Dr Deepak Modi, placenta biologist in NIRRH.

This was the woman’s third pregnancy. Doctors suspect vertical transmission of virus led to inflammation in the lungs of the foetus, leading to its death. While vertical transmission, meaning coronavirus travelling in-utero from mother to foetus, has been recorded, instances of miscarriage due to Covid-19 complications are rare.