Why aren't we showing any cases (so
: far) in Africa or South America?? The Chinese are All over
: the African continent building highways, schools and
: hospitals...

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Michael Snyder
February 14th, 2020

This coronavirus outbreak just keeps getting weirder. With each passing day, the number of confirmed cases and the number of deaths continue to rise, but not all demographic groups are being affected equally. That seems very odd, but it may also give researchers important clues about how to fight this very deadly virus.

On Tuesday, global health officials finally gave this mysterious new coronavirus an official name. From now on they will be calling it “COVID-19”, but I doubt that moniker will really catch on with the general public. In any event, what everybody can agree on is the fact that this disease has the potential to rapidly spread all over the planet, and let us hope that the extreme measures that are being taken to prevent it from getting out of control will be enough.

One of the things that we have just learned about this virus is that it does not seem to affect men and women equally.

According to two different studies, it appears that men are significantly more likely to get infected than women are…

More men than women seem to contract coronavirus, several recent studies of patients at the heart of the outbreak suggest.

Among the Wuhan University hospital patients documented in one study, 54 percent were men. Another earlier study of hospitalized patients was made up of 68 percent men, Business Insider reported.

Scientists do not currently understand exactly why this is happening.

But researchers have pointed out that there was a similar pattern during the SARS outbreak…

The 2003 outbreak of SARS struck more women among younger adults (20-54), but was more prevalent among men in older ages (55 and up).

When University of Iowa researchers exposed male and female mice to the virus, the males were more likely to contract SARS.

Could there be something about male physiology that makes us more vulnerable to a coronavirus outbreak?

This is something that scientists should investigate further.

Another thing about COVID-19 that seems quite strange is the fact that children seem to be a lot less vulnerable to the disease. The following comes from CNBC…

The new coronavirus that has already killed more people than the 2003 SARS epidemic appears to be sparing one population group: kids.

Of the more than 43,100 people it’s infected since Dec. 31, World Health Organization officials say the majority are over 40 years old and it’s hitting those with underlying health conditions and the elderly particularly hard.

Some researchers are theorizing that a lot of kids are actually getting infected but that their stronger immune systems are preventing severe symptoms from manifesting…

The official death rate is still fairly low, but if billions of people end up catching this bug it could result in tens of millions of deaths…

With the global population currently at more than 7 billion (7,577,130,400), that means that the virus has the potential to infect more than 4 billion (4,546,278,240) if Professor Leung is correct and its spread continues to accelerate.

And if one percent of those people die, that means there will be more than 45 million deaths.

A death toll of that magnitude would put this crisis on par with the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.