Authors
Dustin D. Flannery, Sigrid Gouma, Miren B. Dhudasia, Sagori Mukhopadhyay, Madeline R. Pfeifer, Emily C. Woodford, Jeffrey S. Gerber, Claudia P. Arevalo, Marcus J. Bolton, Madison E. Weirick, Eileen C. Goodwin, Elizabeth M. Anderson, Allison R. Greenplate, Justin Kim, Nicholas Han, Ajinkya Pattekar, Jeanette Dougherty, Olivia Kuthuru, Divij Mathew, Amy E. Baxter, Laura A. Vella, JoEllen Weaver, Anurag Verma, Rita Leite, Jeffrey S. Morris, Daniel J. Rader, Michal A. Elovitz, E. John Wherry, Karen M. Puopolo, Scott E. Hensley
Limited data are available for pregnant women affected by SARS-CoV-2. Serological tests are critically important to determine exposure and immunity to SARS-CoV-2 within both individuals and populations. We completed SARS-CoV-2 serological testing of 1,293 parturient women at two centers in Philadelphia from April 4 to June 3, 2020. We tested 834 pre-pandemic samples collected in 2019 and 15 samples from COVID-19 recovered donors to validate our assay, which has a ~1% false positive rate. We found 80/1,293 (6.2%) of parturient women possessed IgG and/or IgM SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies. We found race/ethnicity differences in seroprevalence rates, with higher rates in Black/non-Hispanic and Hispanic/Latino women. Of the 72 seropositive women who also received nasopharyngeal polymerase chain reaction testing during pregnancy, 46 (64%) were positive. Continued serologic surveillance among pregnant women may inform perinatal clinical practices and can potentially be used to estimate seroprevalence within the community.
https://medrxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.07.08.20149179.full.pdf
