Contagion Live News Network: Coronavirus Updates for May 1, 2020

Hello and thank you for joining Contagion. I’m assistant editor Grant Gallagher, here with an update on our COVID-19 coverage on May 1, 2020.

This morning, we covered a survey out of China which found children’s depression and anxiety increase substantially in COVID-19 isolation. Investigators of the survey will continue to follow the situation to evaluate any long term trauma or ramifications on childhood development.

We also covered a study which suggested that men are more like to face fatal cases of COVID-19 than women. In a study of 43 hospitalized patients in China, men had nearly 2.5 times the death rate of women.

The reasons for the correlation between male sex and more severe disease are not clear, and it is not certain if the disparity is innately biological or lifestyle related. However, authors of the study posited that one factor could be ACE2, the protein to which the COVID-19 and SARS viruses attach. It has been shown that circulating ACE2 levels are higher in men than in women and in patients with diabetes or cardiovascular diseases

For more on these stories and other infectious disease news, visit Contagionlive.com.

For Contagion, I’m Grant Gallagher, thanks for watching.