Sabra Klein, a scientist who studies sex differences in viral infections at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says “being male is as much a risk factor for the coronavirus as being old”.

But something confusing is happening in India.

New research by a group of scientists in India and US shows that although men make up the majority of infections, women face a higher risk of dying from the coronavirus than men.

The study, based on Covid-19 deaths in India until 20 May, shows early estimates that 3.3% of all women contracting the infection in India were dying compared to 2.9% of all men. (India had a caseload of more than 110,000 with 3,433 deaths and a fatality rate of 3.1% when the study was conducted.)

In the 40-49 age group, 3.2% of the infected women have died, compared to 2.1% of men. Only females have died in the 5-19 age group.

I asked SV Subramanian, a professor of population health at Harvard University and one of the leader authors of the study, what this implied.

He told me that the narrative of calculating the Covid-19 fatality rate by groups has conflated two key metrics – mortality risk and mortality burden.

Impermanence risk measures the probability of death in a specific group- in this case, total number of deaths of women divided by confirmed infections among women.

On the other hand, impermanence burden gives you the toll of deaths among women as a percentage share of the total deaths, both men and women.

Source___BBC