email article Developing COVID-19 during a high-risk pregnancy is a bad combination for mother and child, but having HIV infection on top of that doesn't appear to make it any worse, a study in South Africa indicated. Of 100 women diagnosed with COVID-19 while receiving care from the high-risk obstetric care service at Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, there were eight deaths: six among the 72 women (8%) with COVID-19, and two among the 28 women (7%) co-infected with HIV, said Liesl De Waard, MBChB, of Stellenbosch University in suburban Cape Town. Of those women who died during the study -- conducted during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic -- only two of the babies they were carrying survived, de Waard said in her oral presentation at the virtual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI).