Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on maternal, newborn, and child health service coverage in Burkina Faso
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: While countries' coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) emergency contingency and response plans aimed to prevent and control the spread of the virus, they also caused major disruptions to health services. We assessed the effects of COVID-19 on coverage and inequalities in select maternal, newborn, and child health services in Burkina Faso. Methods: We analysed data from two cross-sectional household surveys conducted in two provinces, one rural and one urban. The first survey of 3375 households was conducted immediately before the pandemic (February to March 2020) and the second survey in the same areas two years after the pandemic (May to June 2022) using a similar methodology. We compared the coverage of maternal, newborn, and child health interventions and care-seeking between the two surveys to assess the effects of the pandemic on maternal, newborn, and child health services. Results: Our findings did not show significant disruptions in coverage of antenatal service, postnatal care for mothers and babies, child routine vaccination, and care-seeking for sick children during the pandemic. However, there was a dramatic drop of the number of women (23 percentage points) accompanied by their partners for delivery as well as the number of caesarean-section deliveries in urban areas. The shortage of health staff, facility congestion, fear of getting COVID-19 after a caesarean-section admission, and prioritisation of critical health services such as emergency caesarean-section to the detriment of elective cases may explain the decline of caesarean-section rates. Conclusions: COVID-19 did not cause major reversals in the coverage of maternal, newborn, and child health services in Burkina Faso, except for caesarean sections. We also saw no substantial increases in service coverage. In the absence of a counterfactual, we could not attribute the stagnation to the pandemic. However, the very low proportion of women reporting disruption in care-seeking suggests some resilience of the health systems to mitigate the negative impacts of the pandemic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".