Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Care of Newborn Infants born to Mothers with Suspected or Confirmed COVID-19 Infection
Mona Khalaf, Haider Nadhim, Fares Chedid, Yaser Al Sayed, Rola AlAzi, Ahmad Mohd Haider Al Amad, Suad Hannawi, Mahmoud Hamouri, Majeed Jawad, Abdulrahman Al Nemri, Yusra Swaidat, Rola Al Thawbti
Keywords :
Acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2, Coronavirus disease-19, Neonatal intensive care unit, Personal protection equipment, Ribonucleic acid reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, Severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2
Citation Information :
Khalaf M, Nadhim H, Chedid F, Al Sayed Y, AlAzi R, Al Amad AM, Hannawi S, Hamouri M, Jawad M, Al Nemri A, Swaidat Y, Al Thawbti R. Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Care of Newborn Infants born to Mothers with Suspected or Confirmed COVID-19 Infection. 2022; 1 (3):314-319.
The virus severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which was later termed Coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), was first identified as a cause of atypical respiratory diseases in the Hubei Province of Wuhan, China, December 2019, and was then officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 contains a single-stranded, positive-sense ribonucleic acid (RNA) genome surrounded by an extracellular membrane containing a series of spike glycoproteins resembling a crown. In this article, we have reviewed the perinatal clinical implications of SARS-CoV-2 infections and their management in birthing and neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Increasing evidence suggest that strict hospital protocols are needed, but we may not need to separate the mothers and their infants or discourage breastfeeding. We have included information from our infection-control protocols in our hospitals and from an extensive literature search in the databases PubMed, EMBASE, and Scopus. To avoid bias in the identification of studies, keywords were shortlisted a priori from anecdotal experience and PubMed's Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) thesaurus.
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