HEALTH WARNING
We are no longer updating our Covid-19 hub regularly. That includes this page. Follow the link below for the latest.
HEALTH WARNING
We are no longer updating our Covid-19 hub regularly. That includes this page. Click here for the latest.
Covid-19: is gender as important as wealth?
04/05/20 .
News
New age-standardised data published by the ONS confirms that men are twice as likely to die of Covid-19 as women. It also shows that gender combined with deprivation seriously compounds the risk.
The ONS’s data for England and Wales shows that the male age standardised mortality rate (ASMR) for Covid-19 is 50.6 per 100,000 population while the female ASMR is 25.5.
The data show that while poverty and deprivation is a key factor, when coupled with gender, it is doubly serious. A man in the most deprived 10% of the population is more than twice as likely to die as a man in the least deprived 10% and he is four and half times more likely to die than a woman in the least deprived 10%. Indeed, the death rate for the most deprived 10% of women (39.6) is not far off the death rate of the least deprived 10% of men (35.9).
When it comes to Covid-19, gender and deprivation are two key factors in the disease's impact - put them together and the impact can be devastating. This is best seen on the graph below.
We will continue to update ONS death and ASMR figures on our Statistics (England and Wales) page.
Age-standardised data allows populations with different age profiles to be compared. There are for example, far more women than men aged over 85. Age-standardised data takes this into account.
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The Men’s Health Forum need your support It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking. In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to. It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for. We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing. Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.
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