But now it appears as though that policy is about to change.

The New York State Department of Health issued guidance on March 21 advising hospitals that they should allow at least one person in the delivery room, but some hospitals “were ignoring that,” Melissa DeRosa, the secretary to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, said on Saturday at a press conference.

On Friday the Department of Health updated the guidance to make it a directive, “and we are going to reinforce that in an executive order,” which will apply to both private and public hospitals, DeRosa said.

“For labor and delivery, the department considers one support person essential to patient care throughout labor, delivery, and the immediate postpartum period,” the Department of Health guidance said. “This person can be the patient’s spouse, partner, sibling, doula or another person they choose.”

Details about the two cases at Columbia were presented in a paper published online on Thursday in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology MFM. According to the paper, the two women were the only ones admitted to the I.C.U. out of seven pregnant women at Columbia who were confirmed to have Covid-19.

Both of the women admitted to the I.C.U. were induced at 37 weeks and did not become symptomatic until after they delivered their babies, the paper said. They also had underlying health problems: One was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes mellitus and intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy, a pregnancy-related liver disorder, and the other with chronic hypertension.

The authors concluded that these case studies suggest “a need for immediate changes in obstetric clinical practice,” adding that “it is reasonable to suspect that asymptomatic Covid-19 presentations are common and represent a substantial contribution to disease spread.”

As New York has become the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, with nearly 39,000 cases in the state and more than 23,000 in New York City, area hospitals have become deluged with patients. From Wednesday morning to Thursday morning alone, 100 people died of the coronavirus in New York State, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said at a news briefing on Thursday.