Dr. Philip had been vacationing abroad when his country entered lockdown on March 12, and he noticed something unusual when he returned to work in late March. He asked why there had been no orders while he was gone for the breast milk-based fortifier that doctors feed to the hospital’s tiniest preemies. Intrigued, Dr. Philip and his colleagues compared the hospital’s births so far in 2020 with births between January and April in every year since 2001 — more than 30,000 in all. “Initially I thought, ‘There is some mistake in the numbers,’” Dr. Philip said. The very tiniest infants, those under 2.2 pounds and considered extremely low birth weight, usually make up three per thousand births.

Source: International New York Times July 19, 2020 09:00 UTC