At Harvard’s GenderSci Laboratory, Harvard Chan School academics and colleagues gather and analyze knowledge to view answers.
July 31, 2020 – When COVID-19 swept the world, it killed many more men than women. Some have advised that biological points are the cause of the difference. But researchers from Harvard’s GenderSci Laboratory, adding several Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health students: Believes that social points can play the maximum role.
The lab—which focuses on generating feminist concepts, methods, and theories for scientific research on sex and gender—includes gender scholars and biomedical scientists from Harvard and other universities. They’ve been gathering and analyzing data from across the U.S. to better understand gender disparities in COVID-19 cases and deaths, looking at factors including age, occupation, pre-existing conditions, behaviors, race and ethnicity, and living environment.
Last month, the lab launched its U.S. Gender/Sex COVID-19 Data Tracker, which provides the full maximum collection of coVID-19 statistics separated by sex, and should be held to the public. Two Harvard Chan School academics, Ann Caroline Danielsen, an MPH-65 student focused on physical fitness and social behavior, and Tamara Rushovich, a PhD student in population fitness science, worked to create and launch the tracker.
Danielsen visited the websites of each of the state’s 50 states to collect COVID-19 knowledge of sex and sex, as there is no central repository of that knowledge. “One of the most demanding situations is that every online page is another and informs your knowledge in another way,” he said. Some states may supply knowledge in a complete spreadsheet; others can provide small graphics that cannot be copied and pasted. “I’ve been through the 50s several times and it’s been a lot of work for me,” he said.
Rushovich analyzed knowledge and produced graphs and tables highlighting other facets of gender-separated COVID-19 knowledge, such as the number of instances and deaths, case and death rates, age-adjusted mortality rates, and mortality rates over time.
Knowledge shows that COVID-19 rates and mortality between men and women vary significantly from state to state. “In some states, the male mortality rate is almost double that of women,” Rushovich said. “In other states, it’s almost the same. This suggests that there are probably other contexts (social factors, occupational exposures) that influence the reasons why rates vary between men and women, and that it is not only similar to biological differences.”
As they ran on the tracker, scholars discovered that, in many places, knowledge was incomplete. For example, deaths reported through COVID-19 do not come with deaths in the house or in retirement homes, which basically involve women. Therefore, the GenderSci laboratory has introduced another task: a “newsletter” on the surveillance status of COVID-19 in all 50 states. Danielsen and Joseph Bruch, a PhD student in the physical fitness sciences of the population, worked on the newsletter, which was published on July 14 and will be updated monthly. “We see the newsletter as a tool to empower individual states,” Danielsen said. “We hope this will put some pressure on states to replace the way they meet and report on knowledge.”
GenderSci’s COVID-19 paintings headlined. Lab Directors Heather Shattuck-Heidorn of the University of Southern Maine, Meredith Reiches of the University of Massachusetts at Boston and Sarah Richardson of Harvard University wrote an editorial on June 24, 2020 for the New York Times exploring imaginable reasons for the gender gap in COVID – 19 deaths, and Danielsen, Bruch and their colleagues wrote a blog on July 14 on fitness issues in the newsletter.
Learning more about why COVID-19 affects others more than others can help states achieve greater prevention, intervention and reaction efforts, Rushovich said. “When you have a broader concept of who, why, and where certain equipment is disproportionately affected through COVID, then you can get greater direct resources, such as test and touch search sites, and one day there will be a vaccine, vaccine distribution.” She.
– Karen Feldscher
Featured photo: Shutterstock
Additional photos: Courtesy of Ann Caroline Danielsen, Joseph Bruch, Tamara Rushovich