The coronavirus pandemic has reached all parts of the world, and healthcare staff is struggling for saving people from this deadly infection. There is still no complete information and data on this virus and it is hard to predict why this infection is more deadly in some people than others. The new study shows that Covid-19 fatality is higher in men.
So far, the medical experts and healthcare department was convinced that elderly patients and people with underlying medical conditions are at a higher risk. But the new study, now published in an open-access journal “Frontiers in Public Health” has revealed that the COVID-19 fatality is different gender-wise.
The study conducted on men and women who have contracted coronavirus tells that men are more likely to experience its complications and eventually death. It suggests that male patients of COVID-19 need more medical care and attention than women, especially those who are older or have pre-existing diseases i.e. heart diseases, diabetes, etc.
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For most of the people, the symptoms of COVID-19 are mild and not dangerous. Some of them have even healed without receiving specific treatment. But on the other side, the COVID-19 fatality is higher in some people and they need a higher level of protection and treatment.
Previously, researchers confirmed that older patients and those with underlying diseases are more likely to die from COVID-19 complications. But Dr. Jin-Kui Yang from Beijing Tongren Hospital was able to identify another common factor among COVID-19 fatality cases.
Dr. Yang and his colleagues assessed many coronavirus patients to check if this infection has gender-based differences or not. Their observational study included 43 confirm coronavirus patients who were under their treatment. The information of these patients is also available among the official databased of COVID-19 patients in China.
This new virus is much similar to a previously known virus, SARS which caused an outbreak in 2003. Just like SARS, coronavirus also attaches to ACE2, a protein found in cells. based on this similarity, researchers also compared the coronavirus dataset with SARS dataset from 2003’s pandemic.
Dr. Yang and his fellow doctors confirmed that older people and patients of certain diseases are at a higher death risk by the coronavirus. But somehow men are more likely to experience complications than women. They also checked if age is a variable in this COVID-19 fatality risk but it was not the case.
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Surprisingly, overall, all deaths caused by coronavirus has 70% men and only 30% of women. It makes this risk of death for men to be almost three times higher than women. Another interesting fact is that ‘being a man” itself is a risk factor regardless of age for experiencing the worse onset of COVID-19 symptoms.
The previous SARS pandemic of 2003 also had this weird trend that men were more likely to die with the severity of symptoms than women. Another attention-grabbing fact is that these proteins in which both these viruses attack ACE2 are higher in men and less in women.
In addition to this. ACE2 proteins are also more in number in patients experiencing cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, lungs, and kidney infections. And all of these people are included in a high risk group for COVID-19 fatality risk.
Although this study has opened a new avenue in trends of coronaviruses linked deaths still it requires detailed research to determine the exact cause behind it.
This present study was based on a small population sample and can not be projected for all the coronavirus patients. But it is the first-ever study to indicate this gender-based variable in COVID-19 fatality and severity of symptoms. This study also highlights the need for arranging more focused patient care for men.
