Opinion: Account for gender/sex to make personal protective equipment safer for women
Covid-19 is not a gender- or sex-neutral killer. Men are more likely than women to need intensive care for the disease or die of it. Among health care workers, however, the tables are turned: Women accounted for 73% of the more than 9,000 U.S. health care workers who had been infected with the novel coronavirus by early April.
This gender/sex difference has been seen in other countries, and it isn’t because more women than men are on the frontlines of Covid-19 care. The design of personal protective equipment might be to blame.
