By MOSES K. GAHIGI

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As the coronavirus pandemic rages, life continues albeit with a lot of difficulty, but life has been critically disrupted.

Pandemic-induced complications have had a negative impact on pregnant women and their unborn babies, but the effects were even more debilitating for infants and their mothers.

Christine Nyirarukundo a resident of Kigali contracted the virus a few days to her due date, with attention put on the pregnancy and her sick husband she didn't take a Covid-19 test early enough.

She went into labour not knowing that she had the virus, but she delivered her baby girl safely through caesarean.

However, a few days after returning home, all hell broke loose, she started coughing and sweating profusely, with a high fever. When she started struggling to breathe, her husband called an ambulance. She was rushed to intensive care unit and the new mother was put on oxygen.

She left her five-day-old daughter home to be taken care of by a relative as doctors fought to save her life.

"It's hard to describe the emotional pain I went through separated from my baby, it was unbearable," she said.

After a month in hospital, Christine made a full recovery and went back home, but her infant daughter would not latch to breast feed.

A couple that preferred anonymity experienced a setback when their baby was born prematurely and needed oxygen to survive, but the hospital they went to had run out of ventilators because all of them were being used for Covid-19 patients.

The baby died and the young couple lost their first-born child.

Ronald Asiimwe got married last year in August in the midst of the pandemic, and his wife is now just days to giving birth. He says for him bringing a life into the world at a time like this is bitter sweet. On one hand he is excited at the fact that he is just days away from meeting his son, but the uncertainties and health scares reduce his excitement.

"We got married in the pandemic and we are giving birth in the pandemic, in a way it is like giving birth during war, you worry how the child and the mother might be affected yet you realise there is a lot you don't have control over," he said.

In some hospitals, husbands have been kept out as their pregnant wives entered rooms to meet with their gynaecologists for check ups and consultations.

In the African setting, birth of a baby is a celebration that brings together family members, friends and the community at large, but this has been taken away, to the point where people give birth and are not visited for months.

Nevertheless, the fertility steak among couples has not relented. The back-to-back Covid-19 lockdowns have seen a baby boom in Rwanda.

A midwife who works in a popular hospital in Kigali said they delivered an unprecedented number of babies this year.