ORIGINAL: MakeeLearn
More than 70% of Coronavirus deaths in Italy are men and scientists admit they are 'mystified' by the disparity between genders
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... y-men.html
"At least 3,400 people in Italy have died of the devastating disease - it yesterday announced it had a higher death toll than China - but less than 1,000 of them have been women"
I use to joke that "they" would release a virus that would kill just men.
Looking at this I wanted to see if there was any big difference in overall life expectancies between Men and Women in Italy, comparative to other countries. Basically there isn't - overall Italy has one of the highest life expectancies in the world and there is the typical c.4-5 year advantage for females.
I was looking at this site
https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/wor ... h-rankings and whilst nothing of note came up in terms of what I went to look for there is a wealth of other information. I'll let people have a browse themselves for comparisons of their own interest but just a few things I observed:
Worrying point (or perhaps not?) - Italy's death rate/100k for influenza and pneumonia is one of the best in the world - the rate in the UK is almost 3x higher (8.15 vs 23.01) and I couldn't find a European country worse. The US is roughly in between at 14.91. Spain is 10.21. If you wanted to look at it from a more optimistic viewpoint (from a UK perspective at least) you might wonder whether these differences reflect differences in exposure rather than difference in resilience. In which case Italy and Spain's low death rate might paradoxically give an explanation as to why they are struggling more. Further support for that was when I looked in passing at Japan - who seem to have been doing well - where influenza/pneumonia death rates are even higher than in the UK (34.54) and indeed is their second highest cause of death behind coronary heart disease
Interesting specifics - China has one of the highest death rates in the world for lung disease (not including cancers). Diabetes death rates are higher in Italy than in other European countries and China, although slightly lower than in the US
Interesting general point - going off the cases/1m population from the table above, the three countries proportionately most affected at this point are Italy, Spain and Switzerland. As above Italy has the 8th highest LE in the world. Spain is #3 whilst Switzerland is #2. So I started wondering about a pattern until Japan threw a spanner in the works again by taking the top spot of the highest LE in the world. For reference the US and UK are at #34 and #22 respectively.
Worrying and depressing point - when you are browsing through the numbers it really draws into focus the stark contrast between health outcomes in the 'first' and 'third' worlds. For a start you wouldn't even immediately think of South Africa as being the latter but their death rate for Influenza/Pneumonia is 86.33. Even more worryingly the death rate for HIV/AIDs is 273.12 [:(]. In general looking at African countries the latter gives great cause for concern given the implications for large proportions of the population having compromised immune systems. In many of the countries influenza/pneumonia go from being around 8-10 in the list of causes of death in European countries to being in the top 5 and often in the top 3. The hope really has to be that their climate is too warm for the virus to survive and transmit because otherwise the numbers of deaths will be appalling I think.
