Men are 65 per cent more likely than women to die from coronavirus, according to statistics.
Figures from the World Health Organization and Chinese scientists have revealed that 1.7 per cent of women who catch the virus will die compared to 2.8 per cent of men, even though neither sex is more likely to catch it.
More than 98,000 people around the world have now been diagnosed with the virus, which causes a disease called COVID-19, and at least 3,383 have died.
Some experts have put the higher risk among men down to higher smoking and drinking rates – both habits weaken the immune system, making people more likely to get ill.
The elderly and infirm have also been found to more at risk of coronavirus, with 10.5 per cent of heart disease patients expected to die if they catch the deadly virus.
Death rates among people with diabetes – of which there are four million in the UK and 34m in the US – are expected to be around 7.3 per cent, while six per cent of patients who have high blood pressure might die if infected.
Some 5.6 per cent of cancer sufferers infected with the coronavirus would be expected to die along with 6.3 per cent of people with long-term lung diseases.
In the US, at least 233 people have now been confirmed to have the coronavirus, and 12 have died from it, while in the UK there has been one death among 116 cases.
The male-female analysis was produced by the statistics website Worldometer, which is tracking the outbreak in real-time.
It added that men were also disproportionately likely to die during the SARS and MERS outbreaks, which were caused by extremely similar coronaviruses in China and Saudi Arabia.
Professor Paul Hunter, from the University of East Anglia, said women may simply have better immune systems and be biologically better at fighting off the virus.
‘Some of the differences are probably due to men smoking more and being chronic abusers of alcohol, but also, women are intrinsically different to men in their immune response,’ he told The Daily Telegraph.
The UK announced its first coronavirus death on home soil yesterday after a patient, believed to be a woman in her 70s, died in a hospital in Reading.
The death came as the number of infections in the country has doubled over the past two days from 51 to 116.
Meanwhile in the US, which declared its first official case of the infection on January 20, 12 people have died – the 12th was recorded in Kings County, Washington yesterday.
Age is a major factor in how seriously ill the coronavirus is likely to make someone.
Those aged 80 years or older are most at risk, with 14.8 per cent of people catching the disease in that age bracket expected to die.
However, the UK Government’s chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, yesterday reassured the public that not old person who catches the disease will be ‘a goner’.
And the younger someone is, the less chance they have of dying.
Between 60 and 69 years old the death rate is around 3.6 per cent, while it is more like 1.3 per cent for those aged 50 to 59.
For people in their 40s this drops to 0.4 per cent, and it’s just 0.2 per cent for those in their 30s.
Children do not seem to catch the virus very often, according to data from China, and there are no high-profile reports of children dying.
Almost 300 million students worldwide faced weeks at home with Italy and India the latest to shut schools, as health officials on Thursday warned many countries were not doing enough to fight the outbreak.
The number of cases rose above 96,000 worldwide with over 3,300 deaths in some 85 countries.
The Paris marathon, Russia’s main business forum and Italy’s final match against England in the Six Nations Championship on March 14 were among the events cancelled or postponed.
In the UK forty-five patients have already been told to self-isolate at home instead of getting hospital treatment because they have minor flu-like symptoms, amid mounting fears overwhelmed NHS hospitals won’t be able to cope with an inevitable outbreak.
The guidance is at odds with guidelines set out by the European Centre for Disease Control, which says patients must be separated from the public and isolated in hospital in the first stages of an epidemic.
The vast majority of cases and infections have still been in China, in its Hubei province of which Wuhan is the capital city, but the situation there is coming under control some two months after it began.
Elsewhere in the world, however, under-prepared countries are facing uncontrollable outbreaks and surging numbers of deaths.
In South Korea, more than 6,500 people have caught the infection and 40 have died.
Italy, the worst-hit Western nation, has recorded 3,858 infections and 148 amid an outbreak which began in its skiing resorts in the Alpine north.
And Iran, where an epidemic has happened at breakneck speed and infected senior politicians, there are 3,513 confirmed cases and 107 deaths on record.
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