Via The Globe and Mail, a report by The Canadian Press: Women make up over half of COVID-19 deaths in Canada, counter to trends in most of world. Excerpt:
Women account for more than half the COVID-19 cases and deaths in Canada, making the country an outlier running counter to the overwhelming trend that sees the disease killing more men than women in most of the world.
Women represent 53 per cent of Canadian deaths linked to the disease, the highest proportion in any country, according to numbers compiled by a research initiative at the University College London’s Centre for Gender and Global Health. The nearest among countries that report gender data are Portugal and Finland, at 51 per cent. In the United States, Sweden, France and England, the proportion of female deaths is between 40 and 44 per cent.
Quebec and Ontario are driving the trend in Canada. In Quebec, 54.9 per cent of novel coronavirus deaths have been among women, 54.4 per cent in Ontario. Women account for 59.3 per cent of infections in Quebec and 56.9 per cent in Ontario, according to numbers compiled by the provinces as of Friday.
Experts say the trend in infection and death rates among men and women has important implications for how the disease is managed, particularly because the people who care for the sick are also mostly women.
“The response needs to be gendered,” said Kirsten Fiest, an epidemiologist at the University of Calgary. “We have these socially constructed and prescribed roles where women are both the sick and the caregivers. This has to inform the response.”
Likely explanations for why more women are contracting the disease and dying from it in Canada are relatively clear. Long-term care homes are the hotbeds of infection in this country. The illness is particularly hard on people over the age of 70, and Canadian women outlive men by an average of four years. More than 70 per cent of Ontario and Quebec long-term care residents are women, and more than 80 per cent of personal support workers and nurses working at high risk of infection in long-term care homes are also women.
However, it is too early to reach any final conclusions: The course of the pandemic so far is that it moves among vulnerable populations while testing lags and methods shift for counting cases and deaths.
