Can SARS-CoV-2-infected women breastfeed after viral clearance?

The recently emerged novel coronavirus pneumonia, named the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), shares several clinical characteristics with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and spread rapidly throughout China in December of 2019 (Huang et al., 2020). The pathogen 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is now named SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and is highly infectious. As of Apr. 9, 2020, over 80 000 confirmed cases had been reported, with an estimated mortality rate of 4.0% (Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020). Person-to-person transmission and familial clustering have been reported (Chan et al., 2020; Nishiura et al., 2020; Phan et al., 2020). However, there is no evidence of fetal intrauterine infection in pregnant women who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 in their third trimester (Chen et al., 2020). It is unclear whether breastfeeding transmits the virus from previously infected and recovered mothers to their babies. Here we report the clinical course of a pregnant woman with COVID-19. In order to determine whether SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted to newborns through breastfeeding, we measured viral RNA in the patient’s breastmilk samples at different time points after delivery.