介绍： 从新冠病毒致死率看女性生存优势
Why Are So Many More Men Dying from Coronavirus?
SHARON MOALEM 2020年4月10日

第一段：

As coronavirus continues its spread across borders, oceans and continents, there is a perplexing piece of data that has so far evaded a proper explanation: It’s still early, but in almost e...

介绍： 从新冠病毒致死率看女性生存优势
Why Are So Many More Men Dying from Coronavirus?
SHARON MOALEM 2020年4月10日

第一段：

As coronavirus continues its spread across borders, oceans and continents, there is a perplexing piece of data that has so far evaded a proper explanation: It’s still early, but in almost every country that we have numbers for, more men than women are dying from the virus.

Most attempts to explain this discrepancy have focused primarily on behavior, some of which are almost certainly valid. Higher rates of tobacco consumption, a reluctance to seek proper and timely medical care and even lower rates of hand-washing absolutely do play a role in who will be hit hardest.。

But what is being overlooked in these explanations is that the disproportionate toll coronavirus is taking on men isn’t an anomaly. Rather, it may be a timely and high-profile demonstration of what up until recently has been an underappreciated scientific fact: When it comes to survival, men are the weaker sex.

第二段：

What lies behind this female genetic superiority? It starts at the chromosomal level.

Biologists have long understood that XX chromosomes give females an advantage in some arenas: Having the use of a spare X in case the other is somehow defective is why females are less susceptible to disorders like color blindness, for instance.

If one X chromosome has genes that are better at recognizing invading viruses like Covid-19, for instance, immune cells using that X can focus on that task, while immune cells using the other X chromosome focus on, say, killing cells infected with Covid-19 instead, making the fight against the virus more efficient.

第三段：

The cost women seem to pay for having a more aggressive immune system, one that’s better at battling both malignant cells and invading microbes, is being more prone to autoimmune diseases.

But the understanding of these differences has the potential to fill in the gaps of knowledge that have kept us from making medical breakthroughs. Our male-centric, one-size-fits-all model of health care and the research culture that stems from it need to change. Nowhere is this urgency more apparent than the current global pandemic, as the alarming numbers of male deaths worldwide continues to climb daily.