Abstract
COVID-19 is reported as an extremely contagious disease with common symptoms of fever, dry cough, sore throat, and tiredness. The published literature on incidence and gender-wise prevalence of COVID-19 is scarce in Pakistan. Therefore, the present study was designed to compare the distribution, incubation period and mortality rate of COVID-19 among the male and female population of district Attock. The data were collected between 01 April 2020 and 07 December 2020 from the population of district Attock, Pakistan. A total of 22,962 individuals were screened and 843 were found positive for RT-qPCR for SARS-CoV-2. The confirmed positive cases were monitored carefully. Among the positive cases, the incidence of COVID-19 was 61.7% among males and 38.2% among females. The average recovery period of males was 18.89±7.75 days and females were 19±8.40 days from SARS-CoV-2. The overall mortality rate was 8.06%. The death rate of male patients was significantly higher (P<0.05) compared to female patients. Also, the mortality rate was higher (P<0.05) in male patients of 40-60 years of age compared to female patients of the same age group. Moreover, the mortality rate significantly increased (P<0.05) with the increase of age irrespective of gender. In conclusion, the incidence and mortality rate of COVID-19 is higher in males compared to the female population. Moreover, irrespective of gender the mortality rate was significantly lower among patients aged <40 years.
Highlights
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a human infectious disease caused by a novel coronavirus identified as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2); Zhu et al, 2020)
The findings suggest that the mortality rate from COVID-19 increased (P 60 years (31 cases; 45.4%) of age compared to patients of
The present study showed similar results among confirmed positive cases the incidence of COVID-19 was more prevalent in males (61.09%) compared to females (38.90%)
Summary
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a human infectious disease caused by a novel coronavirus identified as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2); Zhu et al, 2020). The outbreak of this disease occurred in Wuhan a Hubei Province city of China (Huang et al, 2020; Guan et al, 2020) and the infection rate has shown massive growth in a short time. World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a public health emergency on 30 January 2020 due to its rapid spread. In general, the incubation period of COVID-19 is considered as 1-14 days. Asymptomatic patients are considered to be a potential source of infection (Rickman et al, 2021). Previous studies have reported a considerably high mortality rate of 4.3% to 30% (Li et al, 2020; Wang et al, 2020a, b; Zhou et al, 2020; Chen et al, 2020b; Bikdeli et al, 2020)
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