Obesity versus COVID-19
By: Aambar Agarwal
The obesity epidemic has long plagued the US; COVID-19 is just a newcomer. Unfortunately for us, there’s a deadly correlation between the two: the more overweight you are, the more likely it is for you to die or develop a serious illness due to COVID-19. Here’s what you should know.
Obesity: having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher.
Currently, over 40% of Americans are obese. If nothing changes, by 2030, one in four Americans will be severely obese (i.e. more than 100 pounds overweight).
Obesity, also known as having an excess of body fat, comes with a plethora of chronic (and often fatal) diseases: type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and cancer, to name a few.
Like the COVID-19 pandemic, the obesity epidemic is split upon racial lines. According to the CDC, Blacks currently have the highest prevalence of obesity at 49.6%, followed by Hispanics at 44.8%, whites at 42.2%, and Asians at 17.4%.
There are many causes: genetics, diet, lack of exercise, medications, and medical conditions. And there have been many attempted solutions, such as simple lifestyle changes by the people themselves, sugar taxes by some city governments, and the Let’s Move! public health campaign by Michelle Obama.
Yet the problem continues to persist, from the moment it was declared an epidemic in the 1990s, to the current coronavirus pandemic of 2020.
Obesity interferes with the immune response.
Those with obesity experience a weaker immune response; specifically, there is a reduced functionality of certain immune system cells, such as natural killer cells and macrophages.
Furthermore, obese people experience a chronic mild state of inflammation. This renders vaccines less effective (but still better than nothing!), since vaccines depend on the inflammatory immune response to help cells protect against future invaders.
This means that obese people are more susceptible to COVID-19, including when vaccinated. And some researchers are saying that the first few COVID-19 vaccines won’t even work on them.
That trend has been seen for the past few months in hospitals all over the US. The CDC even issued a warning about the trend. To put this in perspective, out of the 151 COVID-19 patients surveyed during March, 73 were obese: nearly 50%.
Governments need to step up.
If we want to eventually defeat COVID-19, we need to combat obesity. We need to encourage nearly half of the nation to lose weight.
This can’t be done without action on all levels – federal, state, local, and the people themselves – but the most successful changes can only happen with help from the federal government.
The US can take inspiration from the recent proposals the UK made this July. Their campaign focuses on reducing the UK's obesity rates by encouraging overweight people to use a 12-week weight loss app, expanding weight management services, including nutritional labelling on all foods, and ending the promotion of high fat, salt, and sugar products in stores and advertisements.
We suffer from higher rates of obesity than the UK, yet we’re the ones without a plan. We have the same problems that the UK is now tackling, yet we continue to do nothing. Even if we just implement the same policies as the UK, we could make a difference in COVID-19 and obesity-related deaths, as well as in the racial inequalities that plague the nation.
But for now, it’s up to the Trump administration to enact the sweeping change our country needs.