A new study has indicated that babies born within the first year of the epidemic scored lower on a developmental screening test than those born just before it.
The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, monitored 255 babies born in New York City between March and December 2020, which was the pandemic's epicenter in its early days.
An infant's ability to roll from back to stomach, how often they babble, and other milestones were all assessed for social, communicative, and motor skills at 6 months of age using a standard questionnaire.
Though most of the illnesses were mild or symptomatic, over half of the moms in the research contracted the virus at some time throughout their pregnancies.
A previous study indicated that similar situations had no effect on the brain of a developing fetus.
However, "infants born to mothers who have viral infections during pregnancy have a higher risk of neurodevelopmental deficits," according to Dr. Dani Dumitriu, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia.
She believes that being born in an environment of lockdowns and other pandemic-related stressors on families that disrupted childhood, such as job loss or unstable housing, also played a role.
In most areas, newborns born during the pandemic performed worse than those born before. The researchers discovered that this held true whether the babies were delivered to moms who had been infected with COVID during pregnancy or not.
They cautioned that the findings may not be predictive of long-term developmental delays.
Rather than increased occurrences of developmental impairments, the variations were modest variances in average scores between newborns born before and after the epidemic began.
While social skills, fine and gross motor skills, and communication skills were all lower among the newborns born during the epidemic, communication skills were slightly higher.
More than 60 infants born at the same hospitals before the pandemic began were also evaluated at 6 months old, and their scores were compared to those of 62 infants born at the same hospitals before the pandemic began at the New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital.
The researchers hypothesized that the stress experienced by pregnant women as a result of the pandemic could explain the decline in kids' motor and social skills.
They also suggested that fewer play dates and different interactions with stressed caregivers could explain why kids born during the pandemic have lower social and motor abilities than babies born before the outbreak.
The researchers wanted parents to understand that the findings do not necessarily imply that this generation will be impaired later in life.
