Previously submitted to: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance (no longer under consideration since Aug 18, 2020)
Date Submitted: Aug 17, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Are men dying more than women by COVID-19?
ABSTRACT
Background:
In the last few months we have been experiencing a serious epidemic, which has spread throughout the world. The COVID-19 virus has already killed and infected thousands of people. A question that arises is about the risk groups, and if men would be more susceptible to this disease than women. In addition, what secondary factors would have the greatest impact on infection and death rates?
Objective:
We aimed to clarify if the infection and death rate by COVID-19 differ among gender in the top 50 countries with the highest death rates.
Methods:
we applied meta-analysis and meta-regression approaches in public data from a total of 50 countries that presented the highest death rate by COVID-19.
Results:
There was not significative difference between men and women to be infected by COVID-19 (P = 0.42), though a significative difference was observed for death rate (P < 0.0001). High heterogeneity was observed among countries. For both infection and death rates this variability was mainly explained by the HDI (42.3% and 54.2%), average age (40.9% and 40.3%) and temperature (30.1% and 39.3%). Man are dying more than women around the word by COVID-19.
Conclusions:
Men are dying more than women. No significant difference was observed for infection rate between genders. HDI was the most important factor affecting both infection and death rates. Countries with highest HDI present less difference between sexes. This could be an evidence of the importance of public politics to promote the general well-being of the population equally.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.