It turns out that hospital births are still way safer than home births even in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and they could avoid potential serious complications, according to one New York doctor. Dr. Daniel Roshan, a top high-risk maternal-fetal OB-GYN, gave an EXCLUSIVE interview to HollywoodLife about the precautions pregnant women, including stars like Katy Perry, 35, and more should take while prepping to bring their little ones into the world and it includes planning a hospital birth because the risks of home births are higher than contracting the coronavirus. “There can always be emergencies with babies and fetal distress, hemorrhage and bleeding,” Dr. Roshan EXCLUSIVELY told us. “So the general complications, those complications are a lot higher risk than getting Coronavirus.”
Dr. Roshan went on to explain what exactly hospitals are doing to make sure expectant moms have a safe experience when giving birth. “Each hospital has their own protocols but most hospitals have different floors for COVID-19 patients,” he said. “Labor and delivery floors are separate. They don’t mix them up. If a patient is pregnant and has COVID-19 and has symptoms, they are probably going to be filling those floors or in a separate room that has a negative pressure. So they serve to keep them separate.”
“They make sure that they don’t mix them up,” he continued to say about the pregnant patients with COVID-19 and those who don’t have it. “The babies that are born to mothers with coronavirus also get tested. Those babies are encouraged to be separated from the mother. The mother could pump the breast [for milk] and give it through the bottle, but not directly to the baby. But if a patient refuses to be separated from her baby despite the doctor’s recommendation, they could still give them the baby but would have the mother wear a mask and gloves. Most of the mothers who don’t have coronavirus are encouraged to have their babies with them 24 hours a day.”
Dr. Roshan also touched upon how medical professionals are doing everything they can to keep patients, especially pregnant ones, protected by protecting themselves and wearing the appropriate gear and taking the appropriate actions. “Doctors and nurses are using special precautions and garments with everybody and wearing a mask regardless if they have coronavirus or not,” he said. “When it comes to patients with COVID-19, they have high shielded isolation, complete PPE (personal protective equipment), which is wearing whole gowns and gloves and masks and then when they come out, they remove all of them and throw them away so they won’t mix them up. Washing their hands for 40 seconds with soap and water, using Purell, etc. so they’re very careful. Hospitals have very strict criteria for cleaning disinfectant, there’s hand sanitizer in every room. Every doctor is washing their hands with soap and water, using Purell. So the hospital is actually very safe.”
Dr. Roshan concluded by advising pregnant women to not be afraid to go to the hospital to give birth. “I would like to send the message to pregnant patients that they should not be scared of going to the hospital,” he confidently said. “There are some women that are planning to have home births which would be a lot less safe for them to stay home and get into complications. So far nobody has gone to the hospital and got coronavirus from the hospital floor unless their healthcare workers were working without proper precautions. As far as the transition from one patient to the other, it’s very, very rare.”