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Brazil faces ‘risk of a generation of orphans’ as coronavirus kills pregnant and post-partum women
- Over 4,000 pregnant women or women who gave birth were infected with coronavirus just in the first four months of 2021, with 494 deaths
- The government has moved pregnant women into the priority category for vaccinations, but the decision comes too late, says an expert
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It began with the elderly. When an Amazonian variant appeared, a broader range of Brazilians started dying. Then those in their 40s, 30s and even 20s succumbed. Now, in an even more chilling development – with possibly global implications – coronavirus is killing pregnant and post-partum Brazilians, leaving newborn orphans.
As the disease’s toll on the young surges, overwhelming hospitals, some 500 such deaths have occurred in the first four months of this year, according to a group that monitors mothers and babies in Brazil. That’s more than the toll of the previous nine months: some 30 a week, compared with 10.
“Brazil already had a structural problem with women’s reproductive health care,” said Debora Diniz, a researcher at Brown University in Rhode Island who has spent the past few months tracking Covid-19 and pregnancy in Brazil.
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“The pandemic overloaded the health system. There’s now a risk of a generation of orphans.”
The stages of Brazil’s battle with Covid-19 have often been a harbinger for the pandemic elsewhere.
The emergence of a more contagious variant that’s now invading the rest of Latin America, a shift to the young such as that happening in the US and the oxygen shortages that are plaguing India were all seen earlier in this nation of 212 million.
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