Bottom Line: Healthy Moms & Babies is Always the Goal
This is good news, and I don’t know that it changes anything — even in the best of times, if a mother or baby is acutely ill and in need of specialized care, they’ll be separated if necessary. I cannot imagine a mother would have it any other way.
I am glad to see that breastfeeding is still recommended, even if the mother or baby has COVID-19, provided they’re not in need of acute care, and that there’s no demonstrated risk of transmission this way. My experience is limited to myself and my two children, but of three of us, the one who benefited from extended breastfeeding has never been seriously ill, with the exception of shingles (from having the chickenpox vaccine — which I’m told is, “Yay, evidence it was effective” dammit), and one incidence of the flu. The other two of us have been “strep magnets.”
A friend of mine is one of the authors of this paper:
