Dr. Nancy Krieger, Professor of Social Epidemiology, has been recently featured in The New York Times’s “Where Chronic Health Conditions and Coronavirus Could Collide” and in The Boston Globe’s “Unlike much of the country, in Massachusetts more women than men are dying of coronavirus”.
In Where Chronic Health Conditions and Coronavirus Could Collide, author Nadja Popovich and others raise concerns about areas in the United States that are at risk for a coronavirus outbreak due to their higher rates of chronic health conditions. Moreover, minority and poor communities are further at risk due to social and health disparities, as Dr. Krieger notes, “such disparities reflect historical and current inequalities.”
In Unlike much of the country…, author Rebecca Ostriker notes the unusually higher mortality rates of COVID-19 in women than men in Massachusetts, whereas men are dying in significantly higher rates than women in most states and countries worldwide. This gender disparity, in both extremes, may be a result and combination of behavior, biology, and social variables. “For example there’s very well documented differences in gendered behaviors around hygiene in bathrooms,” says Dr. Krieger. “Men are much less likely to wash their hands after using the restroom than women are. So that’s going to have implications for infection.”
Read the full articles in The New York Time and The Boston Globe.
