Corona Virus is killing more men than women. In fact the ratio is close to 2:1. In China, the disease killed more men than women, and in Italy 70% of the deaths are men.
The trends are starting worry authorities are twice more men are dying. In the United States Deborah Birx, the White House’s corona virus response coordinator, alerted the committee that there is a worrying trend in Italy. In every age group, more men are dying than females.
However, the findings on infections are not consistent in every country. In South Korea there are more female infections than males. The trends on death however reveal that more men are dying regardless of the fact that less men are infected in South Korea.
Another worrying trend in Italy is 8.2% of the people infected are dying. It is twice more than the percentage presented by World Health Organisation. In most countries only 2% of the infections result in deaths. Could it be because of the Italy’s ageing population. Italy is the fifth oldest country in the world.
Italy has a median age of 46.5, according to the CIA World Factbook. Italians above the age of 70 represent more than 87 percent of deaths in their country.
The results in Italy are also congruent with the results in the City of Wuhan in China where the virus is believed to have started. There was a study of 99 patients that was conducted. men constituted two thirds of the patients. The same study revealed that half of all the people who were hospitalized had chronic conditions such as heart disease or diabetes.
Women tend to live longer in Italy, China and South Korea where the studies were conducted. Demographic figures suggest that men inherently have health risks that are greater than women. Some of the issues raised are that men smoke and drink in all the countries where the studies were carried out. According to WHO 48% of men above 15 are smokers where as only 2% of women smoke in China. Men in those countries die of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and respiratory diseases between ages 30 and 70.
Years of research have found that women generally have stronger immune systems than men and are better able to fend off infections. The X chromosome contains a large number of immune-related genes, and because women have two of them, they gain an advantage in fighting disease, according to a recent study in the journal Human Genomics. Studies have also found that estrogen was protective in female mice infected with the virus that caused the 2003 SARs outbreak. During that epidemic, men had a much higher case fatality rate than women.
“The honest truth is that today we don’t know why covid-19 is more severe for men than women or why the magnitude of the difference is greater in Italy than China,” said Sabra Klein, a professor at Johns Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. “What we do know is that in addition to older age, being male is a risk factor for severe outcome and the public should be made aware.”
Source: Savanna News