Nurtural Nature — 19 Reasons WhY (iX–13)
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Be Good To Each Other — And consider wearing 2 masks
Coauthor: Alisa Panichkina (undergraduate research assistant)
Coauthor: Brian Gutierrez, M.S., CPT, UQ — Ochsner M.D. Candidate
Coauthor: Daniel Javidi, B.S.
Links to previous COViD19 pieces below =^.^=
UC San Diego — A National Leader Against COVID
COVID & Mental Health
#1 Contraception & COVID (keep taking birth control)
19 Reasons Why: Reasons 2–7
“Women & children first” — not “Men & children first” #8
Table of Contents (click to fast travel)
∘Reason 9. Nature adapts to stressful nurture by producing more women.
· Alisa ∘ Reason 10. Women Have a Higher Survival Rate in General
· Brian ∘ Reason 11. Influenza Advantage XX
· Daniel ∘ Reason 12. Sexual Desire & COVID19
· Jarryd (Again) ∘ 13(?) Worst outcomes for women who need CPR…
∘ Twitter Chat with Dr. Audrey Blewer
· Be Good To Each Other
· Sidenotes (on this side now)
∘ Gossip Girl — My 1st Restaurant as a Californian
· XOXO: Bisexual & Monosexual Partner Count
· Handwashing Throwback (previously Reason #5).
· Half of all women wear glasses
· Cover your nose
Jarryd
9. Nature adapts to stressful nurture by producing more women.
Stressed out to-be-moms are more likely to give birth to a daughter than to a son (Walsh et al., 2019).
As environmental stress increases, nature prefers increasing the number of newborn women. That strategy would help ensure the continuation of a species in dire times. Basically, Xy can’t get pregnant, & centuries of data on plagues/ pandemics shows that women have survived them more effectively than men for hundreds of years.
Alisa
10. Women Have a Higher Survival Rate in General
In general, when comparing males and females with same disease, women have a higher survival rate. COVID does not eliminate preexisting illnesses and diseases, and men tend to have more preexisting comorbidities than women (Baker et al., 2020; Serge et al., 2020). Thus, if for many diseases women have a higher survival rate, & COVID only increases adds up to them and makes it harder for their body to fight a pre-existing disease because it also has to fight with COVID, then it will make only harder for males to survive, therefore, less males would survive.
Examples:
- Dementia → Higher survival rates for females than males with dementia (2 year survival rate prognosis in nursing homes; difference in average survival rate is 25% because it is 75% for females and 50% for males): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1532-5415.1991.tb03602.x
- Hip Fracture → Although the reduction in life expectancy was similar in both genders, the proportion of the years of life lost was higher in men, suggesting a worse impact of hip fracture on survival in men, even after consideration of the higher mortality rate in the general male population.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s001980200100 “
- In Russia, most females retire much earlier than males, so they live longer because they have less stress in their lives than males. When your body is in constant stress, then it is harder to overcome COVID, so males’ survival rate should be lower.
In Moscow, most people use public transportation to go to work. Thus, if more males use it because they have to go to work, they’ll have a higher COVID infection risk due to poor ventilation in the subway carriage.
So women have more opportunities to stay home & even if they go to a store there are restrictions in place to reduce the likelihood of catching COVID.
Brian
11. Influenza Advantage XX
There are differences between sexes when discussing the rate of influenza infection. With influenza vaccinations, females develop higher immune responses compared to males. Oseltamivir (Tamiflu) needs to be converted to the active metabolite, oseltamivir carboxylate, and this is done by carboxylesterase 1 (CES1) in the liver, which females have greater amounts of. This suggests that there are sex differences in drug absorption, resulting in females having lower outcome of infection. Along with estradiol (E2) that is predominant in females, treatment of E2 results in a reduction of the inflammatory response promoting a higher antibody response to the influenza vaccination. There is a reduction of immune cell recruitment within the lungs as estradiol reduces the transcriptional activity of proinflammatory cytokine genes.
Daniel
12. Sexual Desire & COVID19
Gay males are more likely than heterosexuals and lesbians to have more sexual partners. Gay males, heterosexual males, heterosexual females, and lesbians self reported the number of sexual partners they had in the past 12 months. Gay males reported having the most sexual partners compared to the other listed genders and sexual orientations (England et al, 2016). More sexual contact with different individuals could contribute to the spread of COVID-19 and may be a possible reason as to why more males are catching the virus.
An investigation with Brazilian gay men found evidence consistent with this idea (Carvalho et al., 2020). There was a strong association between the number of sexual partners gay men had during quarantine & their COVID symptomatology. Why?
Gay men don’t have a limit on the number of sexual partners they may have, whereas bisexual men (when seeking a straight female partner) & heterosexual men are partially limited by straight women’s higher sexual selectivity. As such, gay men have more sexual partners than straight men.
What that has meant during COVID is that sexual contexts may have placed gay men at greater risk of infection than straight men, as straight men would be in that context less often & thus be less likely to experience higher infection risk in that context.
(For additional data on bisexual women’s sexual partners compared to lesbians, straight women, straight men, & bisexual men, please see below.)
Jarryd (Again)
13(?) Worst outcomes for women who need CPR…
…because if a male is around when a woman goes into cardiac arrest, they’re less likely to help her because they don’t want to be suspected of sexual assault (Kramer et al., 2015). As a result, men are more likely to receive CPR than women (Blewer et al., 2018).
It’s also the case that womannequins aren’t used as often as mannequins in CPR training.
Twitter Chat with Dr. Audrey Blewer
DNR Forms
Be Good To Each Other
And consider wearing 2 masks like President Biden
Thanks for reading =^.^=
“Wearing 2 masks was not shown to affect breathing resistance significantly” (Olivieri et al., 2020).
Sidenotes
Gossip Girl — My 1st Restaurant as a Californian
Gossip Grill is one of only 15 lesbian bars remaining in the United States. Please support them during this time.
XOXO: Bisexual & Monosexual Partner Count
The findings here for lesbians (20.4), gays (52.4), & heterosexuals (18.9W; 17.4M) are consistent with existing literature (though the heterosexual number is perhaps interesting).
Far more fascinating are the novel, rarely reported in disaggregation numbers for bisexual women (40.4) & bisexual men (46). Honestly, the only thing this study is missing is information on the sex of bisexuals’ partners. Given that the proportion of lesbians reporting 2+ sexual partners in the past year is 20.4, it’s likely that bisexual women are courting men about half the time. The same is likely true for bisexual males, especially since straight males are more open to dating bisexual women than straight women are to dating bisexual men.
Thanks to Jeffery et al. (2020) for providing disaggregated data on bisexual, lesbian, gay, & heterosexual participants. Unfortunately many studies discuss ‘gay and bisexual’ men/women as if they’re exactly the same #smh
Handwashing Throwback (previously Reason #5).
Here are a few more citations on sex & handwashing. Just a few.
Prevalence of handwashing XX > Xy
Beijing (Xu et al. 2003)
Asia (broadly) (Sevilimedu et al., 2017)
Canada (Ipsos-Reid 2003; Blendon et al. 2004)
Guangxi: Comparison of Chinese Ethnic Groups (Huang et al., 2020)
Hong Kong (Lau et al., 2004)
Hong Kong (Lau et al., 2005)
Hong Kong (Social Sciences Research Centre (Hong Kong University) 2004)
Hong Kong (Lo et al., 2005)
Singapore (Leung et al., 2004)
South Korea (Park et al., 2010)
United States Airports (Hyde, 2003)
United States (Sansoni et al., 2005–90% women & 75% men)
Healthcare settings (Sharir et al., 2001; van de Mortel et al., 2001)
After H21N1 (SteelFisher et al., 2012)
After SARS (Fung & Cairncross, 2007)
College Students (Anderson et al., 2008)
Female College Students (Drankiewicz et al., 2003)
Health Campaign in Residence Halls (White et al., 2005)
Visual Behavior Prompts (Johnson et al., 2003)
COVID (Cory Clark et al., 2020)
COVID (Everett, 2020)
Over half of all women wear glasses
“…the reports on ocular infection with SARS-CoV-2 are emerging both in high-impact and less stringent scientific literature with hypersonic speed. The situation with COVID-19 represents a scientific opportunity for many and enthusiasm to publish a new observation as first is very high. This brings a true challenge for peer-review to filter out reports and to keep only the most scientific ones in the field that is new to all of us.
The increasing number of publications reveals controversies in their conclusions. An example would be a report demonstrating 13% prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in postmortem human eyes (Sawant et al., 2020) versus none in a different study using comparative methodology (Kumaran et al., 2020) as well as the very first report of retinal findings in COVID-19 (Marinho et al., 2020; Collison et al., 2020).
Novel observations are being reported, such as non-specific retinopathy due to microangiopathy or retinal vascular occlusions. While the direct evidence of virus presence is lacking, the role of systemic factors such as inflammation and increased coagulopathy seem to represent a significant contributing factor in this group of patients. As such, the eye does not seem to be immuneprivileged to COVID-19 but elucidation of exact mechanism of its involvement in tissue damage will require more work” (Kozak, 2021).
More CPR Info
Kralj et al. (2015) investigation of CPR-related skeletal chest injuries found significantly higher odds for sternal fractures in women at a rate of “59% of males & 79% of females”. They also found that sternal fractures were associated with rib fractures such that “1 sternum fracture on average implied 4.71 more rib fractures”.
“sternum fractures occurred in , rib fractures in 77% of males and 85% of females & sternocostal separations in 33% of males and 12% of females. The average number of all SCI per person was thus almost the same in males and females: 10.95 vs. 10.96. The percentage of patients injured and the number of SCI increased with age.”
Quick Nose Reminder
People emit a higher concentration of COVID-19 virus when breathing out of their noses compared to exhaling out of their mouths (Hou et al., 2020)
Jasper inhales via her mouth & Piper inhales via her nose. Both unmasked.
Piper will have a higher deposit of COVID19 aerosols because the highest density of inhaled deposited dose occurs via the nose (Booth et al., 2005, Farzal et al., 2019, Hou et al., 2020; Teunis et al., 2010).
Cover your nose
