Most coronavirus long-haulers are women. That may be because they mount a stronger immune response to the virus.

https://www.businessinsider.com/most-coronavirus-long-haulers-women-immune-response-2021-3

 

Aria Bendix

Mar. 11, 2021

 

In general, men get hit harder by the coronavirus than women.

Men have almost three times the odds of requiring intensive-care treatment for COVID-19 than women, according to a December study, and 1.4 times the odds of dying from the disease.

But women may have a harder time recovering after an infection. French researchers found female long-haulers in Paris outnumber male long-haulers four to one. The findings suggest most of those long-haulers — defined as people with symptoms lasting more than eight weeks — are women around 40 years old with no preexisting medical conditions.

"If you think about who the long-haulers are, we're talking about young women who mostly were super healthy before," Noah Greenspan, a physical therapist who runs a pulmonary rehabilitation center in New York City, told Insider.


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Scientists have a working theory about this imbalance: Women seem to mount a stronger T-cell response to the virus than men, which helps their immune systems identify and destroy it. This can save their lives, but it's a double-edged sword, since an overly robust T-cell response can lead the immune system to attack itself. In that case, the consequences of infection can lead to something akin to an autoimmune disease.

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It's not altogether surprising that women who get COVID-19 die at lower rates than men but struggle with more long-term symptoms. Women live longer than men on average — which might be due to biological characteristics like a stronger immune response, though the science is far from settled — but are also more likely to develop autoimmune diseases like lupus, Crohn's, or rheumatoid arthritis.

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