Scientists Calculate How Often Men Die From COVID-19

Scientists calculate how often men die from COVID-19

The risk of infection is the same for men and women, but the likelihood of a severe course is significantly different.

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The risk of contracting the new coronavirus is the same for men and women. But men are more likely to carry COVID-19 in a severe form, they are more likely to die from the disease. The new study was published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health.

The most well-known and obvious risk group for severe COVID-19 is the elderly with a number of concomitant diseases. Reports that men die of the disease more often than women appeared as early as February 2020. New scientific work has deepened the understanding of this problem.

“In early January, we realized that the number of men who die from COVID-19 is higher than the number of women. We raised the question: are men more at risk of getting sick or dying? It turned out that no one had studied the sex differences in COVID-19, so they started this study,”said Dr. Jin-Kui Yang from Tongren Hospital in Beijing, co-author of the work, in a press release.

Scientists analyzed several samples of data from patients with COVID-19, the total number of which exceeded 1,000. The study also included data on more than 500 patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which had an outbreak in 2003. The study of patients with SARS was due to the similarity of its pathogen to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The study showed that men and women get sick about the same frequency, regardless of age. But men are more likely to carry the disease in a severe form.

In the largest sample of COVID-19 patients, 70% of those who died were men, meaning that they were 2.5 times more likely to die than women. Male gender was a risk factor for developing severe COVID-19, regardless of age.

Scientists noted that in the body of men, angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2, ACE2), with which the coronavirus binds when a person is infected, is more often present in larger quantities than women. Similarly, there were earlier reports of more ACE2 in people from other risk groups - suffering from hypertension and diabetes.

The authors of the scientific work write that new research is required to understand why men are harder to tolerate COVID-19.