Neonatal outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City.

Abstract

We explored rates of premature births and neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) admissions at the Mount Sinai Hospital after the implementation of COVID-19 lockdown measures (March 16, 2020) and phase one reopening (June 8, 2020), comparing them to those of the same time periods from 2012-2019. Mount Sinai Hospital is in New York City (NYC), an early epicenter of COVID-19 in the United States, which was heavily impacted by the pandemic during the study period. Among 43,963 singleton births, we observed no difference in either outcome after the implementation of lockdown measures when compared to the same trends in prior years (p=0.09-0.35). Of interest, we observed a statistically significant decrease in premature births after NYC phase one reopening compared to those of the same time period in 2012-2019 across all time windows (p=0.0028-0.049), and a statistically significant decrease in NICU admissions over the largest time window (2.75 months) compared to prior years (p=0.0011).