New study: Covid hits boys harder

The risk is 50 percent higher for boys than girls suffering from severe Covid-19 virus, which requires intensive care. It appears from an American study in the journal GammaWhich includes more than 20,000 children up to the age of 18 who have been hospitalized due to the Coronavirus.

This has been seen previously in adults, but not clearly in children with covid-19. In many other infectious diseases, boys often fall ill. The hypothesis about this, Tobias Alvin says, revolves around the effect of sex hormones on the immune system today’s news.

At the same time, the study proves that the biggest risk factor, regardless of gender, is the underlying chronic disease. This gives a three-fold increase in risk, which is in line with many previous observations.

In general, however, the risk of children contracting severe Covid-19 virus is very small. Of the 20,714 children in the study who sought hospital care, 2,430 were admitted – 756 of them had symptoms so severe that they needed intensive care.

– If you counted the two million children diagnosed with Covid-19 in the United States last year, you could see that nearly two out of every 1,000 children who were diagnosed had a serious illness. In Sweden, this number is barely one in a thousand infected children, so it is somewhere in the same order of magnitude. Tobias Alvin explains to Dagens Nyheter that this indicates that very few children who become ill develop severe COVID-19 infection.