One in four pregnant people with COVID-19 may have lingering ‘long-haul’ illness

A comprehensive analysis digs into how the coronavirus unfolds in this often overlooked but high-risk group.

As the coronavirus case count ticked up last spring, one worry was on the top of Vanessa Jacoby's mind: pregnancy.

As an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Jacoby is all too familiar with the fact that pregnant people frequently fare far worse than the greater public during outbreaks of infectious disease. During the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, they made up 5 percent of reported deaths even though they accounted for just one percent of the population. And in the early days of the novel coronavirus pandemic, what little information trickled out about SARS-CoV-2 largely overlooked this high-risk group.

“There were all of these questions that we had no idea what to tell our patients when this

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