Men should stay at home to minimise risk. Can we have this conversation?

[DJLippy]

The stats are showing that men are far more likely to die from Corona than women. It's a 70/30 split according to some estimates.

However when I go out on my daily bike ride I notice far more men in the streets than women. They are very vulnerable to Covid I am concerned. Should we encourage men who are not key workers to stay at home? Would society be able to function?

Many of the key services are staffed by women. The NHS workforce is 74% female and nurses and health care assistant workforces (who provide the most intimate care) are 90% female. Even doctors (who we often imagine as male) are 45% female.

The key workers seem to be split by sex quite a lot. For example - nurses and teachers overwhelmingly female. Drivers, engineers, road crews ect overwhelmingly male. Obviously they are allowed to travel freely. They are doing vital work.

Is there a case to be made (to minimise risk) that men should stay in the house?

Aside from the genetic aspects which make men vulnerable to Covid, stats show that men (as a class) all have much lower personal hygiene than women. Women obey the hand washing rules better than men. Therefore women (as a class) are less likely to spread disease.

Meanwhile police have to concentrate their resources on Covid related issues. Considering that men commit 90% of violent crime maybe it's best we introduce a law which keeps the sex with the greatest propensity for criminality in the house.

I cant help but feel like if the stats were the other way around women would be living under house arrest. Or at least face a lot of social pressure to do so...

Can we have a conversation about this?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52183295

So nice try, but men are more vulnerable, more likely to need hospitalization and more likely to die.

Statistics to show that more men are hospitalised and more men die in hospital have been found. They definitely show that men appear to be more vulnerable to serious consequences of covid19, or at least more likely to be admitted to hospital and to dying of it -- insofar as we know that the only deaths attributable to it have taken place in hospitals, I suppose.

BUT

Too small a proportion of the population has been tested to find out whether they have it at the time of being tested (and at present nobody at all has been tested to find out whether they have had it and either do not know they had it or have recovered from it) for us to be able to state with any certainty that one sex or the other is more likely to catch and to be infectious with the actual disease.

It was that area of the argument that I was trying to address, and I really don't know how many times "we simply don't know yet" is going to go on being relevant...

QuentinWinters

I'm really not sure what you are disagreeing with me about?

The op, and others, think men should be shielded for their own safety. Great. Let's do that.

Obviously some women are also in the vulnerable group too so shield them also.

That leaves the group of non vulnerable women to do all of the key jobs and do shopping, medicine collection, right? So, the women who aren't vulnerable will need to do every thing.

I still think there is a bit of a disconnect between the increased risk of men relative to women and their absolute risk.

The shielding group have a high likelihood of death if they catch covid (men and women)

Younger healthy men have a low risk of death (the vast majority will have mild/asymptomatic illness) but for healthy younger women the risk is lower still...

Therefore men don’t need to shield just by nature of being men, but the older/more overweight/other conditions they have will increase this risk so caution is sensible, just as it is for a more senior woman who still insists on popping in the shops everyday.

Aah but warthogs that doesn't fit with the posters who want men removed from society you see.

@DJLippy I have read your posts / threads over the years and they are generally interesting and thought provoking however I have noticed of late that they are tending to become increasingly agitated and offering a little less than the cause you purport to champion needs really - noting amongst other things your thread that was deleted last week.

I know it is an incredibly trying time for us all, I do hope you and yours are keeping safe and well, but I am not sure such threads and some of your comments within are productive in encouraging the debate we need to further what I assume most of us want. Repeatedly pondering a world without ‘men’ seems a little reductive - I don’t want to live in a world without men (at least mine anyway ) I want a world where women coexist alongside men and are truly treated as their equal. This won’t be achieved by the sort of petty sniping I am more commonly beginning to see of late.

There are plenty of ways to skin this cat, your way I fear will only detract from what most of us hope to achieve. I don’t mean to speak ill of anyone but just a little guidance from someone who has seen more years of this than she cares to admit

You can't shield 50% of the population. Once restrictions are lifted they will just become ill all at once.

noting amongst other things your thread that was deleted last week

Thats not a sign of anything

I can't even be bothered any more. It's interesting that the mere suggestion men should have to inconvenience themselves more than women, based on actual facts and statistics, is something we can't discuss.

I’ve been giving this more thought. If male drivers are more likely to have a serious car accident and women are less likely to survive one due to seatbelts being designed for male bodies... should women be shielded/prevented from being passengers in cars with a man driving?

should women be shielded/prevented from being passengers in cars with a man driving

Could you not fix this by changing seatbelts

With DJ OP it wouldn’t be for ever...just til a vaccine (i know it’s hypothetical)

It would be nice wouldn’t it, if they fixed the seatbelt/crash test dummy thing, but that would take political will that isn’t there (although changing almost all civil systems to accommodate the feelings of a vocal minority group is fine of course - sigh)

(Plus how do you make a seatbelt more suitable for women if you can’t even say what one is)

Well exactly dances

With DJ OP it wouldn’t be for ever...just til a vaccine (i know it’s hypothetical)

So, about four years then? You can't see any practical problems with shielding all men, plus any vulnerable women - so pregnant women, those with chronic illness, over 70, heart disease, cancer etc etc for a long period of time? Who is going to do all of the work? Plus care for these millions of people being shielded? Are you seriously suggesting that healthy women between 18 and 69 are going to have to do all of the jobs needed plus all of the social care - shopping, errands to etc for millions of people?

Oh this is hilarious.

dances

And to be fair it might mean that women have to do all the driving...im not sure many people would be happy about that

Can you imagine the daily male headlines

Yeah i can 😀

I can't even be bothered any more. It's interesting that the mere suggestion men should have to inconvenience themselves more than women, based on actual facts and statistics, is something we can't discuss

There are 9 pages of this. How much more discussion do you want?

I still think the thread is unhelpful, petty point- scoring. Like the comment below.

Aside from the genetic aspects which make men vulnerable to Covid, stats show that men (as a class) all have much lower personal hygiene than women. Women obey the hand washing rules better than men. Therefore women (as a class) are less likely to spread disease

Also someone earlier said we already ignore seasonal flu. That is not true. We have an expensive annual vaccination programme for flu with reminders sent to those who need one. Flu is endemic in our population so we now can't eradicate it, but we certainly do not ignore it.

Influenza virus is not endemic - isn't it THE text-book classic of an epidemic viral disease. Each year WHO (without looking it up - but would have thought that it must be them) try to predict the make up of that year's particular virus (the influenza virus genome is in several "parts") and then sets in motion the process of building up vaccine production against that particular one. Part of what makes the dominant type the one to worry about is that it has a susceptible host population - so it'll be sufficiently different from earlier types. The quicker that identification of the dominant type can be done, the earlier vaccine production can be set up. There are companies out there that specialise in this vaccine production with years and years of experience. That isn't the case with this new virus.

I know....I know...I'm an incorrigible mansplainer.

I still think the thread is unhelpful, petty point- scoring. Like the comment below.

Aside from the genetic aspects which make men vulnerable to Covid, stats show that men (as a class) all have much lower personal hygiene than women. Women obey the hand washing rules better than men. Therefore women (as a class) are less likely to spread disease

Even the points scoring is based on a misrepresentation. The number of confirmed cases in countries with extensive testing seems to be roughly equal between men and women; countries with lower testing rates tend to bias towards men because they'll be testing those with severe symptoms. In South Korea, the distribution is 60:40 women to men (though this is an outlier):
www.statista.com/statistics/1102722/south-korea-coronavirus-cases-by-gender/

This is pure speculation but there could be any number of causes for this, for example, men confining their limited hand washing to when it counts most (e.g. prior to eating), women being more sloppy at hand washing, women being more likely to touch their faces, ect. All it really shows is that either hand washing frequency has negligible impact (not that hand washing is a poor idea, just that the number of times it's done isn't the only limiting factor) or that the self reported data is flawed (men who don't wash their hands may be more comfortable admitting this).

Good points gronky

(men who don't wash their hands may be more comfortable admitting this)

It has been a revelation for me since joining MN just how low many of my domestic standards apparently are. I'm regularly astonished by the amount of cleaning, disinfecting, washing of hands, food and clothes, obsessive changing of sheets and towels which goes on- and that's in normal times. So , yes, as a sweeping generalisation it might be easier for men to admit they aren't as obsessive about cleaning (as some MNetters are)

Dido, I wonder if the change the sheets every 10 minutes and shower 4 times a day people on MN generally have the mythical MN chicken for lunch every Sunday?

Ive told ds2 that his jeans should walk themselves to the laundry basket...