More women than men in Canada are getting COVID-19 and dying from it - Business Insider

In April, Canada's chief public health officer Theresa Tam said that nearly half of the known coronavirus deaths in the country were linked to outbreaks in elderly care homes, according to the BBC.Another explanation for the different gender disparity in Canada could be that the virus has affected frontline healthcare workers in the country.Women form 70% of workers in the health and social sector worldwide, according to a report by the World Health Organisation (WHO)In Quebec, this number is much higher, with an estimated to be 80% of the workforce comprised of women, according to the Fédération de la santé et des services sociaux (FSSS-CSN) — the largest union representing the province's healthcare workers."So the healthcare worker population is estimated to be 80% women already, and if you think about what it is in long-term care, it's skewed even further —it's probably closer to 90% of healthcare workers in this setting are female," Sheppard said.According to the CBC, at least 4,000 healthcare workers have tested positive for COVID-19 in Quebec, making up the second-largest portion of infections outside nursing homes."It's such a massive part of the outbreak. If you think about the fact that 20% of all the cases in the province are healthcare workers," said Sheppard."We're seeing the dramatic difference between the community outbreak which is smaller, and then the hospital associate outbreak with healthcare workers and with patients in the outbreak," he added.Sheppard believes that is could be the combination of the virus breaking out in long-term care facilities and affecting predominantly healthcare workers in the province that are skewing the numbers that show more women are dying."If we can split off just the community data in Quebec, people that are not healthcare workers and are not long-term care facility patients, I really think we would see that the balance would be the same as what we have seen in other countries," Dr Speppard said."In the community, we might have a 50/50 mix, but in long-term care facilities and healthcare workers it's absolutely skewed towards females," he added.Meanwhile, researchers in other countries have been trying to understand why men seem to be dying at a higher rate than women.One of the first studies that looked into the gender differences in COVID-19 cases was conducted by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention at the beginning of the year.