1. It’s getting pretty hard to deny at this point that the #covid19 pandemic is especially dangerous for men, particularly older men. washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03…
2. Data from multiple countries now support this claim. In my latest story, I dig into the Spain data in particular which are quite detailed. Men are 65 percent of deaths, but they also have more symptoms, more severe cases in general, more hospitalizations, more ICU admits.
3. With @sarahkaplan48, I previously reported on similar findings, although less detailed, for China and Italy. washingtonpost.com/climate-enviro…
4. This is also true in France, where men represent 73 percent of intensive care admissions. santepubliquefrance.fr/maladies-et-tr…
5. It is true in Germany, where 66 percent of deaths so far are male. rki.de/DE/Content/Inf…
6. It is true in the Netherlands where that number is 64 percent and 63 percent of the hospitalizations are also in men. rivm.nl/documenten/epi…
7. It appears to be true in the United States, based on statistics compiled by the Washington Post, though the CDC as of now does not appear to be putting out the relevant data. washingtonpost.com/national/us-de…
8. I could go on. The real question is why.
9. The data do not really suggest that it is simply men getting infected more to begin with. In a lot of countries, that is indeed the case. But the gender gaps in infection generally aren’t as large as the gaps that exist for severe cases and deadly cases.
10. South Korea is particularly instructive in this regard because there, the large majority of cases are in women. Nonetheless, male deaths are still higher than female ones, although by a smaller margin than in other countries.
11. Note also that the data call into question the hypothesis that higher male smoking rates are the cause. While such an explanation might seem plausible for China, where men smoke vastly more than women do, there’s not nearly so big of a gender gap in smoking in Spain or Italy.
12. Meanwhile, experts who study gender and infectious disease highlight immune system differences in men and women. Lot of evidence of this. humgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…
13. But demographic data n many of these countries show men tend to have shorter lifespans in general, and tend to have noncommunicable diseases like cancer and heart disease at younger ages. These are also risk factors for dying of covid-19.
14. Plus, now we have a Reuters poll in the US saying that men are just less likely to take warnings about the disease seriously, a sociological finding that certainly could lead to some bad outcomes. reuters.com/article/us-hea…
15. The best explanation then would pull from all of this and suggest that the greater toll the disease is taking on men is the result of a combination of nature and nurture, or biology and behavior, if you prefer.
16. Either way, as the evidence piles up, it seems clear that while the disease is dangerous period, and most dangerous for the elderly, there is some additional danger on top of that for elderly men.
17. Younger men have less risk, and yet it's not clear that they can entirely rest easy. Our Spain article tells the story of a 33 year old male nonsmoker who ended up in the ICU from the disease (but survived).
18. Again, for the story, reported with Madrid-based journalist Pamela Rolfe, read here -- washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03….
19. We’ll continue to watch this but at this point, I think what we need is scientific studies that try to disentangle all of this using large scale statistical analyses across countries. /end
