COVID-19 and the Rise of Maternal Deaths: Evidence from Mexico

I use 2013-2020 state-month-year data from official maternal death records to quantify the effect of the pandemic on maternal deaths in Mexico. Using a Poisson count regression model that accounts for seasonal trends and unobserved differences across states, I show maternal deaths started increasing meaningfully in April-May 2020. More specifically, I find that the expected number of maternal deaths increased by a factor of 2 during May-August 2020. Moreover, this increase factor remained above 1.6 after September 2020, indicating that the effect of the pandemic on maternal deaths continued to be meaningful at the end of year. I also provide evidence of the key mechanism that could plausibly explain this increase: COVID-19 was the main underlying cause of 26.5 percent of maternal deaths in 2020. This accounts for nearly all of the increase in maternal deaths from 2019 to 2020.