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: Men at more risk regardless of age
30/04/20 .
News
Men are more at risk for worse outcomes and death, independent of age, from Covid-19.
That is the conclusion of the first academic paper to look at gender and Covid-19. The paper argues that being male is a risk factor in its own right: 'gender is a risk factor for higher severity and mortality in patients with Covid-19, independent of age and susceptibility'.
The new research, from doctors attached to universities in Beijing and Wuhan in China, looked at a set of patients they treated for Covid-19 and at public data and compared them with data from the SARS outbreak in 2003.
They concluded that while men and women were equally likely to catch the virus, male cases of Covid-19 tended to be more serious with the public data showing men 2.4 times more likely to die. The research also showed that while underlying conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, or lung disease (COPD) were important, more than a third of patients (35.1%) who died did not have underlying conditions.
The paper is currently in pre-print which means it has not yet been peer-reviewed by other academics. It has been submitted to the journal Frontiers in Public Health.
- View and download paper: Gender differences in patients with COVID-19: Focus on severity and mortality
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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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