Gender Differences in Patients With COVID-19: Focus on Severity and Mortality

By Jian-min Jin, P. Bai, Wei He, Fei Wu, Xiao-Fang Liu, D. Han, Shi Liu, Jinkui Yang. Frontiers in Public Health, 2020

2,026 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Objective: The recent outbreak of Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) is reminiscent of the SARS outbreak in 2003. We aim to compare the severity and mortality between male and female patients with COVID-19 or SARS. Study Design and Setting: We extracted the data from: (1) a case series of 43 hospitalized patients we treated, (2) a public data set of the first 37 cases of patients who died of COVID-19 and 1,019 patients who survived in China, and (3) data of 524 patients with SARS, including 139 deaths, from Beijing in early 2003. Results: Older age and a high number of comorbidities were associated with higher severity and mortality in patients with both COVID-19 and SARS. Age was comparable between men and women in all data sets. In the case series, however, men's cases tended to be more serious than women's (P = 0.035). In the public data set, the number of men who died from COVID-19 is 2.4 times that of women (70.3 vs. 29.7%, P = 0.016). In SARS patients, the gender role in mortality was also observed. The percentage of males were higher in the deceased group than in the survived group (P = 0.015). Conclusion: While men and women have the same prevalence, men with COVID-19 are more at risk for worse outcomes and death, independent of age.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Infectious Diseases, Oncology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e154211ce522f4c950285f77585e0c0a038f4486

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In Clinical Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

• Risk perceptions of COVID-19 around the world (2020, background): “Men are at higher risk of dying than women (Caramelo, Ferreira, and Oliveios 2020; Jin et al. 2020) and there are signs that in some countries, ethnic minorities may also be at higher risk ( Garg, Kim, and Whitaker 2020; Rimmer, 2020).”
• COVID-19 pathophysiology: A review (2020, neutral): “Although the Chinese series showed equal number of cases between males and females, the data suggested that more men than women suffered from severe disease and died [23,24].”
• Dietary Choices and Habits during COVID-19 Lockdown: Experience from Poland (2020, background): “Previous surveys have indicated that women report a higher rate of concern over COVID-19 and perceive more risks [69,70], despite findings that men are more prone to experiencing a severe course and fatal outcome of the disease [71].”
• Machine learning-based prediction of COVID-19 diagnosis based on symptoms (2021, background): “In addition, male sex was revealed as a predictor of a positive result by the model, concurring with the observed sex bias 16,17 .”