Quote:A newborn in London has tested positive for the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, just minutes after being born to a mother who was also infected with the virus, according to news reports.

Days prior to giving birth, the woman was admitted to a hospital for symptoms of pneumonia, finding out she had tested positive for the virus that causes COVID-19 only after her baby was born at North Middlesex hospital in Enfield, in north London, The Guardian reported.

According to The Sun, the baby was being treated at the hospital, while the mother had been transferred to an infectious-diseases hospital.

It is not known when the child contracted the disease. "We can't say it happened while the baby was still in the womb," Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of Preventive Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, told Live Science. The baby could have also contracted the virus during, or immediately after, birth, Schaffner said.

Some infections pass from a mother to her baby through the mother's placenta, while the fetus is still developing in the womb, or from bodily fluids during delivery. For instance, the Zika virus — which is in another family of viruses from this coronavirus — can pass to newborns both in the womb and during delivery, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). When passed to a baby in the womb, the Zika virus can cause microcephaly and other severe brain defects, the CDC said.

"That was a terrible phenomenon that happened with Zika," Schaffner said.

The first known newborn who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 did so within 36 hours of birth. In that case, it also wasn't clear whether transmission happened in the womb.

Following that news, researchers analyzed samples from nine women who came down with COVID-19 when they were 36 to 39 weeks pregnant, and were admitted to a hospital in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began. All of the women delivered via C-section. To find out if and perhaps when the virus could be transmitted, the team looked at samples of amniotic fluid, umbilical cord blood, breast milk and samples from the newborn's throat.

None of those samples tested positive for the coronavirus, and both the mothers and babies survived, according to that study, published Feb. 12 in the journal The Lancet. In those cases, at least, the virus didn't appear to pass between a mother and her developing fetus.