Fig. 1: Study selection.
From: Male sex identified by global COVID-19 meta-analysis as a risk factor for death and ITU admission
A total of 107 reports were found. Five reports were excluded as they did not report the total number of infections by sex (one intensive therapy unit (ITU) admission only case series and three mortality case series) and one report was excluded as it contained less than five cases. Of the 102 remaining reports, 9 were subsequently excluded due to possible duplication and 1 was excluded due to a large proportion of cases with unknown sex, yielding a total of 92 reports contributing to the analysis. These included three reports from China, which contributed differentially to the analysis. The largest report from China was used for analyses of confirmed cases and mortality by sex with the two other reports from China excluded from those analyses but used for the analysis of ITU admission by sex. This resulted in 90 reports of confirmed cases by sex, eight reports with data on ITU admission by sex and 70 reports with data on mortality by sex. Note that where totals for males and females do not add to the reported totals, this is because sex was unknown for some cases in the original source data.
