Men with the coronavirus have a higher risk of death than women with the virus according to a new study, which reviewed over 70,000 patient records from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, CNBC reports.
In the study released on Monday in the Chinese Journal of Epidemiology, according to BBC News, researchers reviewed 72,314 patient records that were collected before Feb 11. 44,672 of those were confirmed cases of the coronavirus, known officially as COVID-19, 16,186 were suspected cases, and 889 were cases in which the patient who carried the virus did not display symptoms.
These patients were then grouped by the severity of their symptoms: mild, severe or critical. Most confirmed cases were found in patients between the ages of 30 and 69, 81% of the cases were classified as mild and 4.7% were critical. Male patients made up 51% of confirmed cases, with 22,981. Female patients accounted for 21,691 confirmed cases. The fatality rate for male patients was 2.8%, while the fatality rate for women was 1.7%.
Dr. Simon Clarke, Associate Professor in Cellular Microbiology at the University of Reading, told CNBC that the differing fatality rates may be caused by something other than biology.
“It might be down to the sort of men and women included in the analysis; it might be the patients’ exposure to situations that would put them at risk — it might not be an underlying biological reason,” he said. “You have to be able to exclude all sorts of other social factors in order to be able to say there’s a real biological difference — it could be down to circumstance.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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