Novel Coronavirus, which has exploded across the globe, is more brutal to men in outcomes and fatality is almost 2.5 times when compared to women, though both genders have the same prevalence, according to a study published in a recent journal of Public Health.

So far, researchers have confirmed that older Covid-19 patients and those with co-morbidities, such as heart disease and respiratory conditions, are at greater risk of severe disease and death. However, Dr. Jin-Kui Yang, a physician at Beijing Tongren Hospital in China, noticed that the number of men dying from the virus appeared to be higher than the number of women.

"This raised a question: are men more susceptible to getting or dying from Covid-19? We found that no-one had measured gender differences in COVID-19 patients, and so began investigating."

Yang and a group of colleagues analyzed several patient datasets to see if there were differences in how men and women respond to Covid-19. This included data on 43 patients who the doctors had treated themselves and a publicly available dataset on 1056 Covid-19 patients.

The virus responsible for Covid-19 is similar to the virus behind the 2003 SARS outbreak, and it attaches to the same protein, called ACE2, on cells it attacks. Given this similarity, the doctors also analyzed a dataset of 524 SARS patients from 2003.

Strikingly, in the largest Covid-19 dataset, over 70 per cent of the patients who died were men, meaning that men had almost 2.5 times the death rate of women. And interestingly, being male was a significant risk-factor for worse disease severity, regardless of age.

In the SARS dataset from 2003, the researchers found a similar trend, with a significantly higher mortality rate amongst males compared with females. Interestingly, levels of ACE2, the protein involved in the viral attack in both SARS and Covid-19, tends to be present in higher levels in men, and also patients with cardiovascular disease and diabetes, all of whom have worse outcomes in Covid-19.

However, further research is needed to determine exactly why men with Covid-19 tend to fare worse than women. While the current study has a small sample size, and larger studies are needed to confirm the results, this is the first preliminary study investigating the role of gender in morbidity and mortality in patients with the deadly pathogen.

Globally, the number of novel coronavirus cases have surpassed 3.1 million along with reporting more than 200,000 deaths across the world.