While men over 50 tend to suffer the most acute symptoms of coronavirus, women who get long Covid outnumber men by as much as four to one, The Guardian reported. In Sweden, Karolinska Institute researcher Dr Petter Brodin, who leads the long Covid arm of the Covid Human Genetic Effort global consortium, suspects that the overall proportion of female long Covid patients may be even higher, potentially 70-80%.
Dr Melissa Heightman, who runs the UCLH post-Covid care clinic in north London, said, “Around 66% of our patients have been women. A lot of them were in full-time jobs, have young children, and now more than a quarter of them are completely unable to work because they’re so unwell. Economically, it’s a bit of a catastrophe.”
But despite this, there have been relatively few attempts to drill down into why this is the case. Instead, because these conditions predominantly affect women, they have more often been dismissed as being psychological in origin. Over the years, both ME/CFS and chronic Lyme disease have been ridiculed by sectors of the medical community as forms of hypochondria.
