Big gaps between the number of male and female coronavirus cases in parts of Africa and the Middle East suggest that women may be struggling to access testing or care, an aid agency said on Wednesday.
In Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen, more than 70 percent of reported cases were male, compared with a global average of 51 percent, and the same was true in the Central African Republic, Chad and Somalia, said the International Rescue Committee (IRC).
“What we are seeing is a situation in which women are potentially being left out of testing and their health deprioritized,” Stacey Mearns, senior technical adviser of emergency health at the IRC, said in a press release.
“This could have serious ramifications for their physical wellbeing.”
Mearns said that while both men and women in conflict-ridden nations experience difficulty in accessing healthcare, the data revealed that women had a “slimmer chance of seeing a doctor than men” in countries like Pakistan.
In India, the world’s second-most populous nation with over 1.3 billion people, 76 percent of all confirmed cases were men, the nation’s health ministry revealed in early April.
Studies in China, Europe and the United States have shown that men are more likely than women to be hospitalized and die of coronavirus.
But they have not shown the gender gap in confirmed cases that set off warning signals for the IRC. In most of Europe, the numbers of cases are roughly equal between men and women.
“The numbers do not add up,” said Mearns.
source: Kayhan.ir