The details of the 99 coronavirus patients admitted to a Wuhan hospital were written up, as protocol demands, without fanfare: “The average age of the patients was 55.5 years, including 67 men and 32 women,” said a Lancet paper published last month, which reported 11 deaths.
It is an eye-catching discrepancy. A picture is emerging of 2019-nCoV as a novel pathogen that disproportionately affects older men, particularly those with existing illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes. A similar pattern can be found in the statistics on Sars, which caused about 780 deaths nearly two decades ago.
Some scientists are now convinced that these sex differences in clinical data reflect a genuine male vulnerability to coronaviruses, rather than a bias in exposure. The observations add to growing evidence that, immunologically speaking, men are the weaker sex.