Since the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic, it is widely believed that men are more likely to die COVID-19 than women. Now research challenges the notion that the odds of dying from the disease depend largely on biology, finding that coronavirus death rates for black women in the US are more than three times those of white and Asian men.
According to an analysis of COVID-19 death patterns by race and gender in Georgia and Michigan, published this week in the Journal of Internal Medicine.
“The deaths we’re seeing in the pandemic reflect pre-existing structural inequalities; after the pandemic is over they will still be there,” said Heather Shattuck-Heidorn, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Maine and the University of Maine. senior author of the study. , CBS told MoneyWatch.
“Whatever happens is probably not linked to the X chromosome or the Y chromosome,” she added to the sex-determining DNA molecules.
While it is widely understood that social inequality and racism – and not genetics – are driving the racial inequalities that cause white Americans to die from COVID-19 at a lower rate than black Americans, the differences in gender outcomes are considered biological. That has led the medical community to consider giving the female hormone estrogen to older men, for example, as an experimental treatment for COVID, Shattuck-Heidorn said.
However, if that gender-based premise were true, a similar gender difference should be evident in different locations – and it isn’t, the researchers say.
For example, the rate of COVID-19 deaths among men in New York is 1.3 times higher than among women, and in Connecticut the rates were the same, the researchers, including Tamara Rushovich, a doctoral student in public health sciences at Harvard, found. University and Sarah Richardson, director of the GenderSci Lab at Harvard, among others.
Society, not biology
The findings of vastly different death rates between men and women between racial groups in the US indicate that “the gender differences in mortality among COVID patients are largely rooted in social factors,” Shattuck-Heidorn and Rushovich wrote in summarizing their study.
Headlines “pose gender differences in COVID-19 results as a matter of essential biological differences between the sexes. Our findings support an opposing view, that biological factors play a minor role at best. Instead, social factors are influenced by structural. Gender-based racism holds the key to the patterns of gender differences revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic, ” Richardson and Rushovich wrote in an op-ed published by the Boston Globe on Monday.
“Without looking at the intersections between gender and race, the common claim that women with COVID-19 outperform men makes the high death rate among black women invisible,” they concluded.
The role that black women play in the workforce is likely a factor in their higher death rates. Critical workers are at greater risk of becoming infected with COVID-19. First-line jobs, including nursing home assistants and home care worker, are too disproportionately often performed by female minorities
“In any case, the COVID-19 crisis has exposed terrible inequalities in the population. Death rates have been shown to be strongly linked to economic inequality,” said Alexander Monge-Naranjo, an investigative officer and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. . In a blog post on Tuesday, he cited research that “other variables didn’t really matter if income inequality was included before COVID.”
The imbalance also applies when it comes to the race to immunize Americans against the virus. Separate research has found that not only are black and Hispanic Americans more likely to die from COVID-19, they are also also less likely to be vaccinated against it