Queensland mum with COVID-19 delivers healthy baby

A mother infected with coronavirus has delivered a healthy baby at a Gold Coast hospital as health workers look to reassure pregnant women during the pandemic.

A healthy baby has been born to a woman with COVID-19 on the Gold Coast, offering hope amid the ongoing gloom of the coronavirus pandemic.

The baby was delivered in a negative pressure room at the Gold Coast University Hospital in mid-March, the first birth involving a woman with the virus in Queensland.

Both mother and child have been discharged home in an outcome the hospital, which delivers about 100 babies a week, hopes will ease anxiety among other pregnant women due to give birth during the pandemic.

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Gold Coast University Hospital, where two Mums with COVID-19 have delivered healthy babies. Picture: Patrick Hamilton/AFP.

Despite the Mum having the virus, she was handed her baby after the labour and has been able to breastfeed.

Gold Coast University Hospital executive director of clinical governance Jeremy Wellwood said the hospital’s birthing teams had undergone simulation training to prepare for a delivery involving a COVID-19 positive Mum in the weeks before the birth.

“We were able to develop really detailed guidelines and planning so that they were quite well drilled when it came to it,” Dr Wellwood said.

“We needed to follow fairly simple infection control precautions.

“Babies don’t stop getting born because of COVID-19. We were able to basically do what we normally do as a busy obstetric service and really look at that patient experience as our main goal. That’s the message we want people to know - that this can still be that special moment in your life. It isn’t going to be something different because of the virus.

“We’re committed to and we plan for that.’

Infection control procedures involved ensuring staff and the woman’s birthing partner wore personal protective equipment, including masks and gowns.

Dr Wellwood said the experience internationally was that expectant mothers did not appear to experience more complications from COVID-19 than other women their age.

“Most people that are young and fit, which is mostly what pregnant women are, will have a really mild disease,” he said.

“If you are sitting at home about to give birth worrying if your runny nose is COVID-19, hopefully this story will be reassuring to you. The last thing we want would be to have women thinking that this was going to be the most special time in their life that are actually super anxious. That’s the main thing that we’d like to address, that anxiety. Let’s face it. It’s there for all of us but it’s particularly there, I’m sure, if you have a baby in the womb.”

The Gold Coast baby’s Mum is among the 177 people who have been diagnosed with the new virus on the Gold Coast since Queensland’s first case was confirmed on January 29.

Gold Coast infections make up almost one-fifth of all known COVID-19 cases in Queensland, which number 934 after rising by 13 cases yesterday.