COVID-19 much more fatal for men, especially taking age into account

A topical trope is that COVID-19 “does not discriminate.” This is false. A range of factors, including the intersecting dimensions of class, race, preexisting health status and geography make some people much more vulnerable. Some are more likely to contract the virus, especially those living in denser urban areas or working in close proximity with others. Existing inequalities in preexisting conditions such as hypertension or diabetes also magnify the impact of the virus.

But there is one very large gap that cannot be easily explained by either of these factors: the gender gap in mortality rates. Men and women have similar odds of contracting the virus, although there is some variation across countries: in some, women make up the majority of cases; in others, men do. But men face a higher risk of death than women, across the U.S. and indeed across the globe. In England and Wales, for example, male social care workers are dying from COVID-19 at a rate of 23.4 deaths per 100,000, compared to a rate of 9.6 for their female peers.

Our colleague Shamika Ravi reports in her paper “COVID-19 trends from Germany show different impacts by gender and age,” that the gap may be growing as the pandemic spreads. As Ravi writes: “Remarkably, the mortality rate of men is rising significantly faster than mortality rate for women in Germany, for all age groups.

The greater mortality risks for men became apparent early in the early stages of the pandemic, with Chinese men dying at higher rates. As more data from more countries has become available, the pattern has been confirmed. Globally, the risk of contracting COVID-19 is similar for men and women. But the resulting death rates are very different.

“In every country with sex-disaggregated data … there is between a 10% and 90% higher rate of mortality amongst people diagnosed with COVID if they are men compared to if they are women,” Sarah Hawkes, professor of global public health at University College London told CNN on March 24. Prof. Hawkes is co-director of Global Health 50/50, a nonprofit that highlights health inequalities by sex, and is assiduously attempting to aggregate up-to-date COVID-19 figures by sex. Their analyses show that in almost every country reporting mortality data broken by sex available, the risks are higher for men who contract the virus than for women who do. Here we show the gender gap in the ten countries with the highest death tolls at the time of writing:



If rates of contraction are similar among men and women globally (as they appear to be), and assuming, conservatively, a 50% higher mortality rate for men, this means that about 60,000 more men than women have likely died so far (out of the worldwide estimated total of 263,000).

read more at: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/05/15/covid-19-much-more-fatal-for-men-especially-taking-age-into-account/?