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The deadly Coronavirus has infected more men than women, and scientists are divided about why that is.

The virus has killed more than 910 people and infected more than 40 000, with the vast majority of cases in mainland China. A recent study of nearly 140 Coronavirus patients at a Wuhan University hospital offers one of the broadest pictures of how the virus operates in humans so far. The researchers found that the virus was most likely to affect older men with preexisting health problems. More than 54% of the patients in the study were men, and the median age of patients was 56.

Other recent studies have produced similar results. A study of 99 Coronavirus patients at Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital showed that the average patient was 55 1/2 years old, and men represented around 68% of the total cases. A third study of nearly 1,100 Coronavirus patients (which is still awaiting peer review) identified a median age of 47, with men representing around 58% of all cases.

This data has led some researchers to suspect that men have certain biological conditions that make them more susceptible to the virus. But other researchers aren’t so sure.

In the absence of much reliable broad data about the new coronavirus, scientists have turned to a similar outbreak — the SARS pandemic from 2002 to 2003 — for clues. SARS was also a Coronavirus that jumped from animals to people in wet markets. It shares about 80% of its genome with the novel coronavirus, and like the current outbreak, it infected more men than women. In 2017, researchers at the University of Iowa set out to investigate why that was by infecting male and female mice with SARS. Mice studies don’t necessarily have definitive implications for humans, but the researchers did find that male mice were more susceptible to the virus than female mice. The team attributed those results to genes on the X chromosome and hormones such as estrogen that may keep a virus from spreading throughout the female body. — AFP