Despite evidence that pregnant people are at high risk of serious disease, many remain unvaccinated.
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“When she woke up and started to not feel very well, I don’t think it was within her wildest dreams that by the next morning she would be sedated and by herself in an ICU,” Cahill says. The woman spent a few weeks in the unit before she was finally able to go home.Health-care professionals were still sharing similar gut-wrenching stories when the Delta variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 hit the United States.
“Then you take a viral illness that is potentially life threatening — one that affects the lungs and the cardiovascular system — and you have the perfect storm,” says Andrea Edlow, a maternal–fetal medicine specialist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.But the precise danger remained an open question until scientists could quantify it.