From the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic, it is believed that men are more likely to die COVID-19 than women. Now, research questions the idea that the likelihood of dying from the disease is greatly reduced in biology, finding that coronavirus mortality rates for black women in the United States are more than three times higher than white and Asian men.
Black women in the United States die from the virus at a higher rate than any other group, male or female, except black men, according to an analysis of COVID-19 mortality patterns by race and sex in Georgia and Michigan, published this week. this in the Journal of Internal Medicine.
“The deaths we see in the pandemic reflect pre-existing structural inequities; after the pandemic disappears, they will continue to be there,” said Heather Shattuck-Heidorn, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Maine and lead author of the study. for CBS MoneyWatch.
“Anything that happens is probably not related to the X chromosome or the Y chromosome,” she added of the sex-determining DNA molecules.
Although it is generally understood that social inequality and racism – not genetics – lead to racial differences that caused white Americans to die of COVID-19 at lower rates than black Americans, the differences in gender outcomes were seen as biological. . This prompted the medical community to consider administering the female hormone estrogen to older men, for example, as an experimental treatment for COVID, Shattuck-Heidorn said.
However, if this gender premise were true, a similar sexual difference should occur in different locations – and it is not, the researchers say.
For example, the COVID-19 death rate among men in New York is 1.3 times higher than for women, and in Connecticut the rates were the same, the researchers found, including Tamara Rushovich, a doctoral student in science. population health at Harvard University and Sarah Richardson, director of the GenderSci Lab at Harvard, among others.
Society, not biology
Findings of extremely different male-female mortality rates among racial groups in the United States indicate that “the sexual difference in mortality in patients with COVID is largely rooted in social factors,” Shattuck-Heidorn and Rushovich wrote in the study summary. their.
The headlines’ frame gender disparities in COVID-19 outcomes as a matter of essential biological differences between the sexes. Our findings support the opposite view that the best biological factors play a small role. Rather, social factors influenced by gender structural racism are essential to the patterns of sexual disparities revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic, “Richardson and Rushovich wrote in an opinion piece published Monday by the Boston Globe.
“Without looking at the intersections between gender and race, the blanket claims that women with COVID-19 are better than men, making invisible the high mortality rate among black women,” they concluded.
The role played by black women in the workforce is probably a factor in their higher death rates. Essential workers have a higher risk of being infected with COVID-19. There are also front-line jobs, including nursing home caregivers and home caregivers. disproportionately carried out by female minorities.
“In any case, the COVID-19 crisis has revealed abysmal inequalities in the population. Mortality rates have been shown to be strongly associated with economic inequalities,” said Alexander Monge-Naranjo, a researcher and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Petersburg. . Louis. In a blog post on Tuesday, he quoted research that found that “other variables don’t really matter when pre-COVID income inequality was included.”
The imbalance is maintained when it comes to the race to immunize Americans against the virus. Separate research has found that not only are black and Latino Americans more likely to die from COVID-19, but they are also more likely to die. it is also less likely to be vaccinated against it.