And stillbirths from changes in the placenta "the ventilator of the fetus".
https://www.healio.com/news/primary-car ... th-covid19
https://www.healio.com/news/primary-car ... th-covid19
The major thing that we’re talking about are problems in the category of what’s called maternal vascular malperfusion. The placenta is the ventilator of the fetus. It is the first organ to form, and it does a lot of the functions for the fetus that other organs do for us. The fetus — through the umbilical cord — sends a large volume of blood into the placenta. The mother — through the vessels in the uterus — sends blood into the placenta. Those circulations don’t come into contact, but they’re set very close together. And so, you have exchange of oxygen and nutrients from the mother, and waste and carbon dioxide from the fetus. Maternal vascular malperfusion is a group of problems that we see in the placenta that deal with getting the blood from the mother into the placenta. More specifically, the problems we see in COVID-19 patients are with maternal blood vessels. Those vessels are normally wide and stay open, and we see some of the vessels are either more constrictive or they have muscle on them that will cause them to constrict. The other thing we see is actual injuries to those blood vessels — something that’s called atherosis and fibrinoid necrosis —where the wall of the blood vessel is injured, and you have an accumulation of blood clots and inflammatory cells. In general, maternal vascular malperfusion lesions on the placenta are things that we expect to see when moms have preeclampsia or other hypertensive conditions. In terms of consequences to the fetus, maternal vascular malperfusion changes are one of the sets of changes that we tend to see in stillbirths. That’s something, obviously, that we’re worried about a great deal. Some of the maternal vascular malperfusion changes have been associated with cerebral palsy, although not the blood vessel injury that we see in our study. These changes are actually associated with cardiovascular disease in the mothers long term. In the patients in our study, there was one patient who had gestational hypertension — somebody who was not previously hypertensive and who became hypertensive in pregnancy. Otherwise, none of our patients had preeclampsia or gestational hypertension, which makes us think that these changes are more related to the virus.