Assessing Gender-Based Mean Differences in the Recovery Speed among COVID-19 Case Patients in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa

Abstract

The primary objective of this research study was to assess whether there exist gender-based mean differences in the recovery speed from COVID-19 infection among case-patients in Mpumalanga province. A sample of 5723 case-patients in the province was used. Using the date at which the result confirming positivity for each case was received and the date at which discharge occurred, the date function in Excel was used to compute the speed of recovery, measured by the number of days. The speed of recovery from infection was computed as the number of days from first positive to first negative SARSCoV-2 PCR test result. Data was processed in Excel and Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software prior to conducting statistical data analysis. Results show that female case patients in each age group were larger than their counterpart male case patients, while Nkangala district had the largest numbers of case patients across all age groups. The average recovery speed for male case patients was 16.89 days, with a standard deviation of ±7.23 days, while the mean recovery speed for female case patients was marginally lower at 16.87 days, but with a marginally higher standard deviation of ±7.47 days. The Levene’s test for equality of variance statistics (F-statistic = 0.686; p-value > 0.05) reveals no evidence of variability in the recovery speed (days) between male and female case patients.

Key words: Gender mean differences, recovery speed, Covid 19, Mpumalanga Province

DOI: 10.7176/JHMN/80-18

Publication date:September 30^th 2020