Impact of COVID-19 on Infertility Treatments: Not Even a Global Pandemic Was Strong Enough to Hamper Successful Pregnancies

Abstract

The COVID-19 global pandemic has meant a sanitary and social threat at every level and it was not any different for the assisted reproduction industry. This retrospective two-arm study aims to describe its impact on infertility treatments performed in our clinics (IVI Spain, Rome, and Lisbon) regarding: (1) assessment of COVID-19 impact in the amount, type, and success of infertility treatments performed during 2020 compared to 2019; and (2) description of the psychological status of women who got pregnant during the first months of the pandemic and its correlation with their final pregnancy outcome. On the one hand, this pandemic has led to a significant reduction in the total number of treatments performed, even though the proportion of the different types was almost unaltered. Additionally, its impact on pregnancy rates was not clinically relevant. On the other hand, the psychological status of pregnant women did not seem to affect their final pregnancy outcome. These results suggest that, even in the event of a negatively affected psychological status in our study population, it was not translated into an impaired pregnancy outcome. Hence, the COVID-19 global pandemic, although devastating, might not have exerted a clinically relevant negative impact on the overall pregnancy outcome in our clinics.

Keywords

• COVID-19
• coronavirus
• pregnancy
• pandemic
• infertility treatments