Since the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic, it is widely believed that men are likely to die from COVID-19 as women. Research now disputes the idea that the probability of them dying from the disease is largely biologic, and finds that death rates for black women in the US are more than three times the death rate of white and Asian men.
Black women in the U.S. die more strongly from the virus than any other group, male or female, except black men, according to an analysis of COVID-19 death rate by race and gender in Georgia and Michigan, published this week in the Journal of Internal Medicine .
“The deaths we see in the pandemic reflect the existing structural inequalities; once the pandemic disappears, it will still be there,” said Heather Shattuck-Heidorn, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Maine and the senior author of the study. , told CBS MoneyWatch.
“Whatever is going on is probably not linked to the X chromosome or the Y chromosome,” she added about the sex-determining DNA molecules.
Although it is widely understood that social inequality and racism – not genetics – are the racial differences that cause white Americans against COVID-19 to be stronger than black Americans, the differences in gender outcomes are considered biological. This has led the medical field to consider giving the female hormone estrogen to older men, as an experimental treatment for COVID, Shattuck-Heidorn said.
If the gender-based premise were true, a similar gender difference would be visible in different places – and it is not, the researchers say.
For example, the percentage of COVID-19 deaths among men in New York is 1.3 times higher than for women, and in Connecticut the percentage was the same, the researchers found, including Tamara Rushovich, a PhD candidate in population health sciences at Harvard. University and Sarah Richardson, among others, director of the GenderSci Lab at Harvard.
Society, not biology
The findings of many different mortality rates between men and women in races in the US indicate that ‘the gender difference in mortality among COVID patients is largely rooted in social factors’, Shattuck-Heidorn and Rushovich summarized in their study.
Headings “suggest gender differences in COVID-19 outcomes as essential biological differences between the sexes. Our findings support an opposing view that biological factors play a small role at best. On the contrary, social factors influenced by structural gender racism are key to the patterns of gender differences revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic, ‘Richardson and Rushovich wrote in an opinion piece published by the Boston Globe on Monday.
“Without looking at the crosses between gender and race, the blanket claims that women with COVID-19 do better than men, making the high mortality rate among black women invisible.”
The roles that black women play in the workforce are probably one factor in their higher mortality rates. Essential workers are at higher risk of becoming infected with COVID-19. Frontline work, including nursing home assistants and home health assistants, is also out of proportion performed by female minorities.
“If anything, the COVID-19 crisis has discovered unholy inequalities in the population. Mortality rates have been shown to be strongly linked to economic inequality,” said Alexander Monge-Naranjo, a research officer and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. . Louis. In a blog post Tuesday, he cited research that found that “other variables did not really matter when income inequality before COVID was included.”
The imbalance also applies when it comes to the race to immunize Americans against the virus. Separate research found that Black and Latinx Americans are no longer just more likely to die from COVID-19 also less likely to be vaccinated against it.