Patterned Outcomes, Unpatterned Counterfactuals, and Spurious Results: Perinatal Health Outcomes Following COVID-19

Abstract

The epidemiologic literature estimating the indirect or secondary effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on pregnant people and gestation continues to grow. Our assessment of this scholarship, however, leads us to suspect that the methods most commonly used may lead researchers to spurious inferences. This suspicion arises because the methods do not account for temporal patterning in perinatal outcomes when deriving counterfactuals, or estimates of the outcomes had the pandemic not occurred. We illustrate the problem in two ways. First, using monthly data from US birth certificates, we describe temporal patterning in five commonly used perinatal outcomes. Notably, for all but one outcome, temporal patterns appear more complex than much of the emerging literature assumes. Second, using data from France, we show that using counterfactuals that ignore this complexity produces spurious results. We recommend that subsequent investigations on COVID-19 and other perturbations use widely available time-series methods to derive counterfactuals that account for strong temporal patterning in perinatal outcomes.