Coronavirus, covid-19 | Nature: – For every 1000 people infected with corona under the age of 50, almost no one will die.

In a new article in the renowned scientific journal Nature, they have reviewed new figures on how high the death rate of covid-19 really is.

While it is often said that the risk of death from the disease is probably between 0.5 and 1 percent, this is a figure that has very little relevance.

Also read: How lethal is covid-19? New research with surprising results

The reason is that it is becoming increasingly clear that the coronavirus severely discriminates both by gender and age.

Gender can be crucial

A study from Spain shows that the risk of death depends a lot on your gender.

“Men are twice as likely as women,” epidemiologist Beatriz Pérez-Gómez of the Carlos III Health Institute in Madrid told Nature.

According to the survey, the difference is particularly large for people over the age of 80. While women in this age group had a 4.6% risk of death, the figure for men was 11.6%.

Researchers believe that the difference is related to differences in the immune systems of women and men:

– The female immune system may have the advantage of detecting infectious substances a little earlier, says Jessica Metcalf of Princeton University.

T cells do a worse job in men

In a recently published Yale study, among others, it appears that the response of T cells, particularly in men, is significantly worse than in women, and that the efficiency of the cells decreases with age.

T cells are the part of the immune system that destroys already infected cells.

“These findings reveal a possible explanation for the underlying causes of gender differences among COVID-19 patients and make an important contribution to the development of gender-based approaches to COVID-19 treatment,” they write in their summary.

Also read: The body can get two different types of immunity to covid-19: the difference between antibodies and T cells

Age is clearly the most important

It has long been known that age and risk of death are closely related and, according to the article, this is increasingly confirmed.

They have undergone three different studies in Geneva, England, and Spain, respectively, which are completely unequivocal about age as the number one risk factor.

– For every 1,000 people who are infected with the coronavirus and are under the age of 50, almost no one dies. For people in their fifties and sixties, about five out of every thousand will die, and more men than women. The risk then increases dramatically, Nature writes.

The figures they have analyzed are not a distribution of deaths by age group, but the risk of death if infected.

They emphasize that underlying diseases such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease can greatly affect the outcome of covid-19, and not least, how well the health service is equipped, for what age is, with by far the most important when it comes to the risk of death.

According to Nature, one explanation for how older people are more affected may be that many older people tend to have underlying infections in the body, and that Covid-19 causes an already heavily charged immune system to react too harshly.

Voices with Norwegian conditions

The information on gender and age agrees well with what has been seen in Norway. There are many more men who have lost their lives as a result of the crown in all age groups, with the exception of those who are over 90 years old.

The reason for this exception is simply that more women than men are living long enough.

Also read: 109 crown anomalies in a nursing home in Oslo in June