Victoria Fang
11/05/21
Mr. Ippolito
Current Event 7
Emanuel, Ezekiel J. “An Unsolved Mystery: Why Do More Men Die of Covid-19?” The New York Times, 02 Nov 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/opinion/men-covid-19-deaths.html.
I read the article “An Unsolved Mystery: Why Do More Men Die of Covid-19?” by Ezekiel Emanuel. It discusses an interesting dilemma: men being more likely to die of covid-19. Emanuel started the article off by giving a real life case of a family of three that all got covid-19. The mother of the family was worried that she wouldn’t survive it because of the health conditions. However, her husband was the one that almost didn’t make it. Then Emanuel dived into the research done on this topic. The article states, “Globally, the death rate has been about 50 percent higher for men.” Lastly, Emanuel ended the article implying that this whole article is not here to provide answers but to give background information. “Still, the reasons men seem to fare worse remain mostly a mystery. Much more research is needed to understand it, and there are most likely several factors at play.”
Of course, Covid-19 is still a very significant issue right now and will be for the next few decades. There are so many things we have yet to discover about this virus, how it behaves, and how it affects us. Lots of research is being done for many different more dilemmas we have yet to learn the truth about. So, being informed on these current day issues might help us be more cautious because we know something that might affect our lives.
Overall, this article was very interesting to read and it gave a very good anecdote at the beginning to lead the reader in. The title also accurately summarized the article by stating the topic of why men are more likely to die of Covid-19 and that it is a mystery. I also really liked the many thoughts included in the article. It gives the reader more possibilities to think about afterwards. Lastly, I really enjoyed the fact that he stated the main cause of this mystery or issue. “The medical community needs to be more open to exploring sex differences in disease.” However, I thought that the data could have been organized more orderly so that the reader could interpret the data easier.
Isadora Schmidt (Part 1)
ReplyDeleteCitations:
Emanuel, Ezekiel J. “An Unsolved Mystery: Why Do More Men Die of Covid-19?” The New York Times, 02 Nov 2021,
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/opinion/men-covid-19-deaths.html
Victoria Fang wrote a review on the article “An Unsolved Mystery: Why Do More Men Die of Covid-19?” by Ezekiel Emanuel, while I read her review I thought she did a good job on many different aspects. One of those things being how Victoria included multiple quotes from the real article into her review. An example of this is, “Globally, the death rate has been about 50 percent higher for men.” (Fang). Having evidence from the article she read in her review shows that the reader can trust everything she’s saying because when looking at her quotes we can see it is true. The reader also now knows that Victoria read through the entire article and knows what she’s talking about when quoting the article. Another thing that Victoria did well in her review was the way she organized everything in her summary of the article. She did this by saying, “Emanuel started the article off by… Then Emanuel… Lastly, Emanuel ended the article…” (Fang). When Victoria started to talk about something new that happened in the article she always started off the sentence with the author's name and some transition words to help her summary move along easily and have a nice flow to it. Using this sentence structure also makes her summary easier for the reader to understand what she’s saying about the article every time she switches to a new topic. One final thing that Victoria did well in her writing was that her entire review was short and to the point. Sometimes, students are trying to rush their current event comment and get it done quickly so by having a shorter review, it can draw more eyes of students thinking that this read will be easy and fast. It increases the chance of having more students want to write about her review and appreciate the work that Victoria put into this review.
While I think there are many more things that Victoria did great in her review, there are a few things that can easily be improved if she just changed a few things. While Victoria organized her summary and remembered to add quotes from the article in her summary she didn’t really elaborate on anything. In her review she wrote, “The mother of the family was worried that she wouldn’t survive it because of the health conditions. However, her husband was the one that almost didn’t make it.” (Fang). These sentences were the only explanation she did on the three different quotes she put into her summary and all this explanation is that it’s some metaphor which doesn’t make much sense to someone who hasn’t read the full article. If Victoria added more on what this really meant or how it related to the Covid-19 virus, that would have been much more helpful when reading the beginning of her summary. One other thing that Victoria could have done better on was that she didn’t include her own opinion into her review. The closest thing she put in the article that had her view of the article in it was in the final paragraph when she was talking about what the author did and didn’t do well. I think her review would have been amazing if she added a little bit of her own opinion of what the author was saying about the Covid-19 virus, just telling the readers of her review if she thought what Emanuel was saying was true and if she believed his claims that men are more susceptible to the illness.
Isadora Schmidt (Part 2)
ReplyDeleteOne of the reasons I chose to read Victoria’s review was her title which was, “An Unsolved Mystery: Why Do More Men Die of Covid-19?” This drew me into wondering what possible evidence could be stated that proves men are more susceptible to Covid-19 than women and this issue is very current since we are living in a pandemic right now. Also, none of the Covid-19 reviews have really hooked my attention, they all seemed boring to read but since Victoria came up with a clever title it made me excited to see what the article could say about this kind of topic. The thing that made me the most shocked was one of the quotes from the article that Victoria put in her review, the quote said “Globally, the death rate has been about 50 percent higher for men.” (Fang). This quote definitely made me think how in the world this could be possible, is it a gene that men have that women don’t have, or is it because men are less caring about these kinds of things? This quote really left an impact on me and makes me want to find this article and see what the author has to say and find real evidence to back this statement up, it also makes me feel a lot safer seeing that I may be less susceptible to catching Covid-19.