As the coronavirus or COVID-19 continues to spread worldwide, scientists are getting to know how the virus affects humans. Now, researchers have warned that men with lower income, lower levels of education, unmarried, and the ones born in low or middle-income nations, have higher chances of dying due to the deadly disease.
"We can show that there are independent effects of various separate risk factors that have been brought up in debates and news about Covid-19," author Sven Drefahl from Stockholm University in Sweden said. "All of these factors are accordingly individually associated with a strongly elevated risk of dying from Covid-19," he added.
COVID-19 Affects Unmarried Men
The research is based on the data from the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare on all the deaths confirmed due to the deadly disease in Sweden for the adults aged 20 or older. In the research, published in the Nature Communications journal, Drefahl said that the people born abroad abnormally have lower mortality than people born in Sweden. This also applies when the study considered the income and the level of education into account.
The rise in the risk of dying from coronavirus for this group stays after the scientists controlled for circumstances like income and level of education. The research showed that being a man, having a lower level of education, and also lower-income results in a higher chance of dying due to coronavirus. The findings showed that men are twice vulnerable to dying from coronavirus as women. Unmarried men and women had 1.5-2 times as high a risk of losing their lives due to COVID-19 as to those who were married.
As per the scientists, men generally have a higher mortality rate due to mostly lifestyle factors and biology. "The fact that people with little education or a low income have higher mortality may largely be due to lifestyle factors, including finances -- how much one can afford to prioritize one's health," study author Gunnar Andersson said.
"Similarly, we can explain the elevated mortality from Covid-19 for these groups," Andersson also said. A number of previous studies have also shown that single and unmarried people ave higher mortality in case of various diseases, the team of scientists noted. The deadly virus outbreak has created a major stir around the world in recent times infecting more than 36.9 million people globally and claimed the lives of over one million people in more than 170 countries.
