Covid-19 might be taking up all the headlines these days, but there are other reasons to seek medical care that can’t be held up by a pandemic. Katie Couric wonders how hospitals – and moms – are handling having a baby during this global crisis, so on this episode of Next Question, she talks with new mom Alicia Biggs, her obstetrician Dr. Alana Brownstein, another obstetrician working with underserved communities named Dr. Tracy Bone, and a doula named Chantal Traub to discover how hospitals are adjusting their procedures to keep moms and babies healthy and safe, get tips to help pregnant women feel safe and empowered, and much more.
Alicia describes her recent labor at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, which Katie points out has over 2,500 beds and serves an overwhelmingly white, insured community of patients. Right as Alicia was going to give birth, New York enacted restrictions that kept everyone, even spouses, out of the room while the mother was delivering. Those restrictions have been lifted since then, but Alicia tells us all about how her doctor and nurses worked hard to make her lonely experience as positive as possible: they FaceTimed with her husband for all 13 hours of labor to make sure he felt like a part of the process, and gave her a handwritten letter signed by all the nurses telling her, “You are not alone….we’re here for you every step of the way.”
Dr. Tracy Bone works at the Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, a public hospital with just under 600 beds that serves a hugely diverse, underserved community, with Spanish and Bengali being the most commonly spoken languages. They’ve been called “the epicenter of the epicenter,” because it was one of the first hospitals in New York to get hit with Covid-19 cases – and they got hit hard. Dr. Bone tells Katie that the hospital already operates at capacity, with 99% of its beds filled, so they had to make a lot of significant changes in order to keep patients safe. The biggest challenge, though, is that “fear of Covid...has prevented a lot of women from coming in to get the care they need,” she says.
There’s not a lot of data yet about how Covid affects pregnant women: can a woman infected with the virus pass it on to her unborn fetus? Misdiagnosis is a concern, as well, as Dr. Brownstein points out, because “feeling short of breath is a common side effect of pregnancy.” And, as Katie begins a deep dive into the maternal death rate in our country, she’s seeing similar racial disparities in the statistics for Covid as for childbirth in general – what’s the story there? Listen to the episode for much more on how we’re handling pregnancy in a pandemic on Next Question.
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