Pregnancy during COVID-19: social contact patterns and vaccine coverage of pregnant women from CoMix in 19 European countries
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Abstract
Background
Evidence and advice for pregnant women evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. We studied social contact behaviour and vaccine uptake in pregnant women between March 2020 and September 2021 in 19 European countries.
Methods
In each country, repeated online survey data were collected from a panel of nationally-representative participants. We calculated the adjusted mean number of contacts reported with an individual-level generalized additive mixed model, modelled using the negative binomial distribution and a log link function. Mean proportion of people in isolation or quarantine, and vaccination coverage by pregnancy status and gender were calculated using a clustered bootstrap.
Findings
We recorded 4,129 observations from 1,041 pregnant women, and 115,359 observations from 29,860 non-pregnant individuals aged 18–49. Pregnant women made slightly fewer contacts (3.6, 95%CI = 3.5–3.7) than non-pregnant women (4.0, 95%CI = 3.9–4.0), driven by fewer work contacts but marginally more contacts in non-essential social settings. Approximately 15–20% pregnant and 5% of non-pregnant individuals reported to be in isolation and quarantine for large parts of the study period.
COVID-19 vaccine coverage was higher in pregnant women than in non-pregnant women between January and April 2021. Since May 2021, vaccination in non-pregnant women began to increase and surpassed that in pregnant women.
Interpretation
Limited social contact to avoid pathogen exposure during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenge to many, especially women going through pregnancy. More recognition of maternal social support desire is needed in the ongoing pandemic. As COVID-19 vaccination continues to remain an important pillar of outbreak response, strategies to promote correct information can provide reassurance and facilitate informed pregnancy vaccine decisions in this vulnerable group.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2022.06.01.22275775: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: In the UK, the study was approved by the ethics committee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (Reference number: 21795). Sex as a biological variable Study participants: In this analysis, we included pregnant women (self-identified) aged 18-49 years, and non-pregnant women and men of the same age who reported to have no risk factors for serious symptoms if they contracted COVID-19. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The …
SciScore for 10.1101/2022.06.01.22275775: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics IRB: In the UK, the study was approved by the ethics committee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (Reference number: 21795). Sex as a biological variable Study participants: In this analysis, we included pregnant women (self-identified) aged 18-49 years, and non-pregnant women and men of the same age who reported to have no risk factors for serious symptoms if they contracted COVID-19. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The findings presented in this study should be interpreted with several limitations in mind. First, more than half of our data came from the UK which may have obscured patterns from other countries. Relatedly, for the analysis of COVID-19 vaccination in countries other than the UK, we grouped 18 countries together due to data availability. This approach neglected variations in vaccination schedules and the evolution of vaccine policies on pregnancy in individual countries. Both risk perceptions to COVID-19 and vaccine hesitancy also likely differ across countries and change over time. Future research is highly warranted as more data become available. Second, we did not collect data on gravidity and gestational age from pregnant women, which likely have important relationships with perceived need of social support and vaccine acceptance. Future studies should explore factors associated with subgroups of pregnant women requiring particular attention. Third, pregnant and non-pregnant individuals may have interpreted the questions on isolation and quarantine due to COVID-19 differently. Terminologies such as “isolation”, “quarantine” and “social distancing” are distinctively different yet somewhat similar notions that might be misinterpreted, especially for high-risk people who have been given stricter guidelines to maintain social distancing as a form of preventive measure. Our finding on isolation and quarantine might have over-estimated the proportion of pregnant women who wer...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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