Overweight or obese Americans make up more than 73 percent of those who die from the virus, new data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals.
Obese people made up nearly half of all fatalities among hospitalized coronavirus patients reported in the new report.
Those numbers are consistent with the general rates of unhealthy weights in the US. About 74 percent of Americans are overweight, including nearly 43 percent who are obese.
It comes after a World Health Organization (WHO) report revealed that 90 percent of global COVID-19 deaths have occurred in countries where half the population is obese, and yet another study found that two-thirds of hospitalizations for coronavirus was attributable to one of the four. disorders, including obesity.
Obese people are now eligible for COVID-19 vaccines in many states where access has expanded to enable people with chronic conditions to get their shot.
But the increasing data suggests that if Americans had healthier diets and habits, the US might not have had the highest COVID-19 death toll in the world.
As BMI increased, so did the chances of hospitalization, needing care in an ICU, ventilator, or death from COVID-19 at any age, according to the CDC report
The chance that a hospitalized COVID-19 patient would die from the virus increased to almost two-to-one, compared to an average person, for people with a BMI of 45 or higher (bottom)
The CDC report analyzed data on 3.24 million Americans who visited hospitals between March and December 2020.
Nearly 150,000 of them – about 4.5 percent – tested positive for COVID-19.
About half of those patients (71,491) had to be hospitalized and only 35,000 required IC care.
In total, 8,348 of those hospitalized for COVID-19 died.
That means that about 5.6 percent of people who tested positive for the virus eventually died from it.
But rates were much higher among certain groups.
As found in the WHO report last week, obesity was the second most important predictor of who would be hospitalized or die from the coronavirus, after old age alone.
Nearly half of those who died from COVID-19 after being hospitalized for the virus – 49 percent – were 75 or older and did not survive the infection.
Obese people made up only a slightly smaller proportion of the fatalities, namely 46 percent.
Obese Americans were twice as likely to die from the virus as people with health weights, who accounted for 23.4 percent of coronavirus deaths.
The risks were slightly increased for overweight people. Americans with BMIs between 25 and 29.9 accounted for 27.3 percent of the fatalities.
And people who are morbidly obese – with a BMI of 45 or higher – were about 1.5 times more likely to die from the virus than the average person.
Survived or not, morbidly obese people were also at a much greater risk – about twice that – of being kept alive by a mechanical fan.
Mechanical ventilation can be life-saving, but survival rates drop if a COVID-19 patient is sick enough to need this kind of life support.
Two-thirds of COVID-19 hospitalizations were “ attributable ” to obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, or heart failure, meaning they likely could have been avoided had the patients not had these preventable conditions, the Tufts University study estimates.
And fans come with their own risks, including the potential for brain damage for those who spend too long on the machines.
We now know that inflammation caused by the immune system becoming confused in attempts to fight off the coronavirus off-target often overwhelms and kills COVID-19 patients.
Being overweight or obese means that you are at a higher baseline level of inflammation, so the effects of the virus are exacerbated.
Obesity is also believed to contribute to the higher COVID-19 death rates among black and Hispanic patients.
About 50 percent of black adults and 45 percent of Hispanic people in the US are obese, and are far more likely than whites to work essential jobs that force them to be exposed to COVID-19.
They are also more likely to live in food deserts where access to healthy products is limited, while cheap fast food or processed foods are everywhere.
These results underscore the need to promote and support a healthy BMI, which may be especially important for populations disproportionately affected by obesity, particularly Hispanic or Latino and non-Hispanic black adults and household individuals low-income people who have higher prevalence of obesity and are more likely to have worse outcomes from COVID-19 compared to other populations, ‘the CDC authors wrote.
While America has the highest COVID-19 death toll of any country in the world and one of the world’s highest rates of obesity, the link between overweight populations and coronavirus deaths is not unique to the US.
Source: Covid-19 deaths from Johns Hopkins Coronavirus pandemic tracker and World Health Organization (WHO) Global Health Observatory estimates of adult obesity
Research from the World Obesity Federation has found that Covid deaths are 10 times higher in countries where more than half of adults are overweight, and are responsible for as much as 90 percent of deaths worldwide.
So far, nearly 518,500 Americans have died from the virus, the highest death toll of any country and double the casualties in Brazil’s second-worst hit. The US has the eighth highest death rate for Covid worldwide when population size is included, with 152.5 victims per 100,000 people.
It is also home to the highest percentage of overweight people, according to the WOF, with more than two-thirds (67.9 percent) of adults having a body mass index (BMI) over 25. A healthy range is between 18 and 18. 24 and people with a BMI over 30 are considered obese. More than 70 million Americans are obese.
Many U.S. states have included obesity in their list of chronic conditions that make people eligible for earlier access to Covid vaccines, as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
But vaccines are coming too late for thousands of Americans who have struggled with obesity and died from COVID-19.
Thousands of lives could have been saved if the population was leaner, experts said, and lockdown measures may not have to be as drastic if fewer people were overweight or obese and had a lower risk of ending up in the hospital.
The World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the finding was a wake-up call to the West, where sedentary work and processed foods mean obesity has become the norm for the majority of adults.
The report, comparing countries’ obesity rates and the Covid death rate, found that the Covid death rate was 10 times higher in countries where 50 percent or more of the population is overweight.
It saw that 2.2 million of the world’s 2.5 million deaths so far had happened in countries with these high obesity rates.
“Increased body weight is the second largest predictor of hospitalization and a high risk of death for people suffering from Covid-19,” the report said.
Only age figures are a higher risk factor. The unprecedented economic costs of Covid-19 are largely due to the measures taken to prevent the excessive hospitalization and the need for treatment of the disease.
“Reducing a major risk factor, obesity, would have resulted in much less stress for health services and the need to protect those services from overload.”
It’s not the first sign that obesity is a major cause of the toll COVID-19 has taken in the US.
A recent study from Tufts University estimated that about two-thirds of US COVID-19 hospital admissions were due to four chronic conditions: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure.
Obesity also increases the risks of the other three conditions, and complications from all three can be reduced with a healthy diet and exercise.
‘We know that changes in nutritional quality alone, even without weight loss, rapidly improve metabolic health within just six to eight weeks. It is critical to test such lifestyle approaches to reduce severe COVID-19 infections both for this pandemic and for future pandemics likely to come, ” said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, lead author and dean of the Friedman School in Tufts .
And countries where healthy lifestyles are more common – and where governments have prioritized initiatives to encourage them – have fared better against COVID-19.
Data from John Hopkins University on Covid deaths and WHO’s Global Health Observatory estimates of adult obesity show that the UK had the third highest mortality rate per person from coronavirus – at 182 per 100,000 people, only lower than Slovenia (183) and Belgium (192) – and the fourth highest percentage of overweight, at 64 percent.