On Fri, 24 Apr 2020 16:47:58 -0700, Jonathan St. Cloud wrote:

I have learned to do a daily Lysol cleanse then stick an incandescent up
my ass, to stay healthy.

There's an interesting piece in this week's New Scientist. It appears
that substantially more men than women are being admitted to hospital
with COVID-19 - male:female ratios are 2:1 in Wuhan, 7:3 in UK & Northern
Ireland and 62:38 in NYC. Apparently male:female death ratios show
similar proportions.

It also seems that the same male:female imbalance also applies to other
coronaviruses (SARS and MERS) and to viral pneumonia, though this
imbalance is not seen with other respiratory infections.

However, older men are generally in worse health than older women across
obesity, blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, lung and cardiovascular
disease. The NYC study showed that, when this factor is included, the
male:female susceptibility to COVID-19 vanishes.

There's also a suggestion than, as several critical immune genes are on
the X chromosome and that, as women have two X chromosomes against men's
single copy, they may have higher natural immunities.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org