One of the poorly understood aspects of COVID-19 (one of many) is that it affects males more severely than females, if I may be binary when considering gender. This July study on the CDC page, for example, found that globally, “the overall COVID-19 case-fatality ratio is approximately 2.4 times higher among men than among women.”
Is that true in New Hampshire? You bet. The state’s interactive COVID-19 dashboard shows it.
For all age groups, New Hampshire women and men get COVID-19 at about the same rate. (The light blue bar, on the left of each age cohort, is female while dark blue is male – the top chart is absolute numbers, the bottom is per-capita):
But men are hospitalized with COVID-19 more than women in virtually all age groups:
And men die of COVID-19 more than women in all age groups:
Note than women over 80 have more absolute deaths because they greatly outnumber men over 80. A little arithmetic based on these numbers indicates there are 35,000 women over 80 in the state but just 22,000 men.
Why do they outnumber men? Because COVID-19 isn’t unusual – males die more than women of many causes, particularly trauma, in all age groups. The natural birth ratio of people is about 5% more male babies than female babies to compensate for this imbalance.
Males are the weaker sex by any measure other than ability to open stuck jar lids.
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The graphs are nice but lack information about the time frame being covered. The axes are not labeled, either. Hmmm.
I forgot to link to the Dashboard itself so you can check this -I have added that link.
The time frame is the entire pandemic. The axes are labelled but not in the usual way – the X axis is age groups, as shown at the top of each charter, and the Y axis is totals, which are given at the top of each bare.