By Charles Iwuoha

Seventy percent of Coronavirus patients in Nigeria are men between the age of 30 and70, according to data from Federal Ministry of Health.

It is also observed that this is not peculiar to Nigerian as emerging pattern shows that it is more or less a global concern that the virus discriminates and affects more men than women.

The trend was first seen in China, where one analysis found a fatality rate of 2.8percent in men compared with 1.7percent in women.

Since then, the pattern has been mirrored in France, Germany, Iran, Italy, South Korea and Spain.

In Italy, men have accounted for 71percent of deaths and in Spain, data released on Thursday suggests that twice as many men as women have died from the CORVID-19 virus.

The gender disparity in illness and death is harder to explain and scientists are at a loss why this is so.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic reached Italy, early reports out of China suggested men were especially at risk. A study of 99 patients at a hospital in Wuhan, where the virus originated, found that men made up two-thirds of patients, and half of all the people who were hospitalised had chronic conditions such as heart disease or diabetes.

More recent figures from China’s Center for Disease Control, based on tens of thousands of cases, showed a strong gender breakdown of deaths, which were 64 percent male.

“The honest truth is that today, we don’t know why COVID-19 is more severe for men than women or why the magnitude of the difference is greater in Italy than China,” said Sabra Klein, a Professor at Johns Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“What we do know is that in addition to older age, being male is a risk factor for severe outcome and the public should be made aware.”