Comment on “Current evidence of SARS-CoV-2 vertical transmission: an integrative review”

Dear Editor,

We read with great interest the study by Oliveira et al.¹. In their article, the authors have reviewed the current scientific evidence of vertical transmission related to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). However, some concerns should be addressed.

First, only MEDLINE (via PubMed) and LILACS databases were searched for potential articles, which resulted in a significant reduction in the number of search results. Currently, they were more than 15 studies with available clinical characteristics of pregnant women and detailed neonatal outcomes. Other articles published up until 17th June 2020 meeting inclusion criteria can be seen in Table 1 ^{2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20}.

Table 1
Other published reports with available clinical characteristics of pregnant women and detailed neonatal outcomes until 17^th June 2020.

Study	Date of publication	Country	Study design	Language of publication	Admission date	No. of pregnant women confirmed with COVID-19 (n)
Zhu et al.2	Feb. 6, 2020	China	Case series	English	1.20~2.05	9
Wang et al.3	Feb. 28, 2020	China	Case report	English	2.05~2.18	1
Khan et al.4	Mar. 19, 2020	China	Case reports	English	1.28~3.01	3
Yu et al.5	March 24, 2020	China	Case series	English	1.01~2.08	7
Dong et al.6	Mar. 27, 2020	China	Case report	English	1.28~2.22	1
Chen et al.7	Mar. 28, 2020	China	Case series	English	1.20~2.10	5
Lee et al.8	Mar. 31, 2020	Korea	Case report	English	3.06~3.11	1
Gidlöf et al.9	Apr. 6, 2020	Sweden	Case report	English	Not mention	1
Breslin et al.10	Apr. 9, 2020	USA	Case series	English	3.13~3.27	43
Xiong et al.11	Apr. 10, 2020	China	Case report	English	3.7~3.10	1
Khassawneh et al.12	Apr. 14, 2020	Jordan	Case report	English	3.23~3.26	1
Zamaniyan et al.13	Apr. 17, 2020	Iran	Case report	English	3.7~3.26	1
Al-Kuraishy et al.14	Apr. 21, 2020	Iraq	Case report	English	3.13~3.30	1
Wu et al.15	May 5, 2020	China	Case series	English	1.31~3.09	13
Perrone et al.16	May 11, 2020	Italy	Case reports	English	3.01~4.30	4
Xia et al.17	May 17, 2020	China	Case report	English	1.23~2.20	1
Lowe et al.18	May 28, 2020	Australia	Case report	English	Not mention	1
Wang et al.19	Jun. 8, 2020	China	Case series	English	12.08~4.01	30
Bani Hani et al.20	Jun. 12, 2020	Jordan	Case report	English	3.28~4.12	1

Second, the authors stated that “This review was performed according to a standard protocol for systematic reviews, which was based on the methodological manuals of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA)²¹”. But we can’t find the PRISMA checklist in the manuscript or supplementary material.

Third, the authors didn’t exclude studies suspected of including duplicate reporting. The data from reference 15 (Yan et al.²²) in this review were pooled from a national registry including 25 hospitals with study dates overlap. We suggest that when a hospital had published their cases more than once, only the paper with the biggest data was included to minimize the possibility of double counting.

• Funding: none.

REFERENCES

• ¹
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• ²
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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  09 July 2021
• Date of issue
  2021

History

• Received
  27 Sept 2020
• Accepted
  21 Oct 2020