Mendes, J. M., Baptista, H., Oliveira, A., Jardim, B., & De Castro Neto, M. (2022). Beyond comorbidities, sex and age have no effect on COVID-19 health care demand. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 1-12. [7356]. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-11376-5 -------------------------------- This research was supported by project Data4Covid19 (project ID: 62821), funded by the European Regional Development Fund, through the Operational Competitiveness Programme—COMPETE 2020, in the framework of 15/SI/2020—R&D Companies and Testing and Optimization Infrastructures (COVID-19). The authors acknowledge the editors and reviewers, whose comments and suggestions helped to improve the presentation of the paper. This paper explores the associations between sex, age and hospital health care pressure in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Portuguese mainland municipalities. To represent the impact of sex and age, we calculated COVID-19 standardised incidence ratios (SIR) in Portuguese mainland municipalities over fourteen months daily, especially focusing on the Porto metropolitan area. A daily novel indicator was devised for hospital health care pressure, consisting of an approximation to the ratio of hospitalisations per available hospital medical doctor (HPI). In addition, 14-day incidence rates were also calculated daily (DIR14), both as an approach and an alternative to the current national pandemic surveillance indicator (which is not calculated with such regularity). Daily maps were first visualised to evaluate spatial patterns. Pearson's correlation coefficients were then calculated between each proposed surveillance indicator (SIR and DIR14) and the HPI. Our results suggest that hospital pressure is not strongly associated with SIR (r = 0.34, p value = 0.08). However, DIR14 bears a stronger correlation with hospital pressure (r = 0.84, p value