More men die from covid-19 than women – but why? A brief look across data from several countries suggest a sex bias among old men. But this does not account for the fact that men generally live shorter than women and are under-represented in late-age cohorts 1/5

Accounting for male-female representation suggests that male mortality bias is pretty stable then declines in >80 olds. Note that data is extremely messy but best resolution datasets (Italy, Spain) suggest so. Difficult to see, but could be a bell shaped curve? 2/5

If correct, this suggests that male susceptibility to covid-19 does not increase with age during adulthood but is present all the way through. Sex differences in immunity? Would be interesting to see if it coincides with sexual maturity 3/5

Late-life (>80yo) decline in sex differences in mortality could be due to selective disappearance, but impossible to tell with this data 4/5

Data: https://globalhealth5050.org/covid19/ 
Pop Data: https://populationpyramid.net 

w/ help from @AlexeiMaklakov

n.b.
1. "Pop. Adjust" = adjustment for relative number of indivduals at each age class.
2. Values above the horizontal line = male bias, below = female bias.

#covid19 #demography