Menopausal and Covidious— of all the luck!

What does the news that 50–60 year old women are more likely to suffer from Long Covid actually mean.

Seriously, I apologise for all the self-portraits. I’m locked down alone. What’s a girl to do? Next time you can have a cat. I promise. (Photo by Author)

1 in 20 people who are known to have had Covid are sick for at least 8 weeks. That measure in itself is limited — there’s a whole lot of difference between those people who are better after a couple of nasty months, and those who are still struggling after 8. There may also be a fair few people who may never know that they had Covid, which would mean that the probability of Long Covid could beconsiderably less.

Across all ages, women are more likely to get Long Covid than men. If that seems to be simply more evidence that Mother Nature is a misogynist, it’s worth considering that men have twice the risk of dying of Covid than women.

The reason for both those things is that women’s immune systems fight harder than men’s do. They fight infection harder, but sometimes they also fight our own bodies harder. When the immune system starts attacking the body, that’s an auto-immune condition and women suffer much more with auto-immune conditions than men. Long Covid is said to ‘mimic’ an auto-immune disease. So there’s a distinct possibility it works in the same way.