Gender Differences in Patients With COVID-19: Focus on Severity and Mortality

The recent outbreak of Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) is reminiscent of the SARS outbreak in 2003. We aim to compare the severity and mortality between male and female patients with COVID-19 or SARS. Study Design and Setting: We extracted the data from (1) a case series of 43 hospitalized patients we treated, (2) a public data set of the first 37 cases died of COVID-19 and 1019 survived patients in China, and (3) data of 524 patients with SARS, including 139 deaths, from Beijing in early 2003.

Older age and high number of comorbidities were associated with higher severity and mortality in patients with both COVID-19 and SARS. Age was comparable between men and women in all data sets. In the case series, however, men tend to be more serious than women (P=0.035). In the public data set, the number of men is 2.4 times that of women in the deceased group (70.3% vs. 29.7%, P=0.016). In SARS patients, the gender role in mortality was also observed. The percentage of male were higher in the deceased group than in the survived group (P=0.015).