Written by Mia Davis

2020 has faced us with a challenge most of us didn’t expect, the Covid-19 pandemic. Some brilliant people have been trying to warn us for years that something like that is bound to happen, but we didn’t listen. People at higher levels, in charge of the big decisions, didn’t take it seriously. And now it’s turned into a full-blown tragedy. Before saying we’re too small to do something about it, think about the aspect we can control: our health.

One word has emerged from all this, and it affected me on a personal level. It’s a word that we all should pay great attention to because our health and future may depend on it: comorbidities. Many things affect the extent to which this horrible virus can hurt us. And most of them are out of our grasp. But one of the things considered as comorbidity really shocked me: being overweight.

The truth is it shouldn’t surprise us. Doctors have been warning us for years that our lifestyle will take a severe toll on our health. So the fact that being overweight makes us vulnerable to viruses shouldn’t come as a shock. But it’s like the warnings they place on cigarette packs; they are horrible, and everyone sees them, but so few actually take them seriously until it’s too late. The difference is Covid-19 doesn’t take years to bring us down.

SARS-CoV-2 is a serious threat to any person, regardless of their age, but it’s extremely dangerous for those with pre-existing conditions. Among what doctors call comorbidities, obesity occupies a top place. It’s more common than we realize, and it’s closely connected to a significant number of diseases, rendering the organism extremely vulnerable to this aggressive virus. Obesity and Covid-19 is an extremely flammable combination, and the consequences can be catastrophic.

Obesity and Mortality

The fact is obesity is extremely dangerous on its own, even without adding Covid-19 into the mix. If we take a look at the most common causes of preventable death in the US, obesity and being overweight occupy the second place. According to the National Institutes of Health, it kills more Americans than tobacco use, more each year. And in the context of the highly contagious SARS-CoV-2, the consequences of obesity are even more extended. Studies have shown without doubt that overweight and obese patients faced much worse outcomes after being infected with this virus.

Two Epidemics Combined – the Perfect Storm

We may not like to hear it, but obesity has turned into an epidemic for a while now, and it’s spreading at a concerning pace. It causes heart problems, respiratory issues, and so many other illnesses, and kills about 300,000 people each year. That’s a huge number! Not to mention the ground it has set turns the Covid-19 pandemic into an even deadlier menace.

How does that work? Excessive body weight leads to chronic inflammation and a high risk of inflammatory lung disease. While it may not be evident at this point how SARS-CoV-2 works, it’s clear that, in most cases, it causes a severe inflammation of the respiratory system. Those two factors combined leave little hope for survival.

I read an article in the New York Times, written by two prominent doctors, who warn us that the worst part is yet to come. They talk about the Covid-19 pandemic as being the perfect storm because of the following aspects:

  • It’s incredibly contagious, more than other viruses we have faced
  • It’s a new virus, so there’s no immunity against it
  • Many infected people show no symptoms, which makes them dangerous, as they will spread the virus without knowing it
  • It can be ten times more dangerous for your lungs than seasonal flu

If you add to that the pre-existing conditions many people have, the results can be awful. And obesity or being overweight are behind many of the pre-existing health issues we have to face.

The Obesity Pandemic in the US

SARS-CoV-2 and other similar viruses can have a more significant impact in the US than in different regions of the world. And the reason is the general health of the population. I read an interview with David Kass, a cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Dr. Kass pointed out that obesity affects about 40% of the population of the US. That’s an extremely high percentage, and if we compare it with that of China (6%) or Italy (20%), we should worry even more. These two countries have received a massive blow from the pandemic, and people were in much better shape than almost half of the US population. That high percentage can easily lead to disastrous consequences both for our health and our economy.

This is what Dr. Kass said:

‘People with substantial obesity – say a BMI over 35 – are carrying a lot of excess weight mostly in their abdomen, below the diaphragm. You move your diaphragm toward your feet every time you breathe, and if you have an extra 80 pounds or more to move, that makes breathing harder. This would be true, really, for any respiratory disease. With Covid-19, we’re also seeing that the membranes separating the lung airway sacs and blood vessels surrounding them become leaky, allowing fluid to enter the airways. This makes it hard to get oxygen from the air to the blood, so the diaphragm has to work even more – and obesity restricts this.’

What Can We Do?

Obesity isn’t something that you can fix overnight; it takes years of healthy eating and being active to get back to a decent BMI (which, by the way, is under 30). So the only measures you can take in front of the Covid-19 threat, apart from strictly maintaining physical distance and wearing a mask, are the following:

  • If you have health conditions, keep taking your medication as prescribed
  • Do the best you can to have nutritious and healthy meals and try to maintain a decent level of physical activity
  • Keep in touch with your healthcare provider and if you feel any disturbance in your health, ask for help

Obesity will also be an obstacle to getting the right diagnosis. Doctors will have to carefully differentiate the SARS-CoV-2 effects from those that obesity itself has caused, and that can be quite challenging.

Don’t Think You Know Better!

Even if you don’t consider weight to be an issue and you feel your health is pretty good, you still need to take the warnings seriously. You may feel strong as a bull, but you’re not. The virus won’t care that you feel energetic or that you don’t believe Covid-19 exists and that it can affect you. Reality has a way of kicking us when we least expect it, and this year is slapping us with a high dose of crappy reality.

And the fact is you don’t have to be obese to have unstable health, even being moderately overweight is a severe problem. Dr. Matteo Rottoli shared in an interview the conclusions Italian doctors have reached after facing the Covid-19 pandemic. And the one that needs to be underlined is that even mild obesity doubles the risk of respiratory failure if you are infected with SARS-CoV-2.

If this virus has shown us anything, it’s that you don’t necessarily have to be old, obese, or very ill to be severely affected or even become one of the victims of this pandemic. But if you are in one of these risk categories, it’s even more important to take some measures.

We Need to Do Better

The Covid-19 pandemic needs to be a loud wake-up call to most of us, myself included. It’s easy to ignore the consequences of an unhealthy lifestyle until something like this happens. It’s not worth risking your life when it’s really not that difficult to do something to improve your health. We need to realize that this may not be the only severe pandemic we have to face in our lifetime. All the 2020 memes may be funny, but this may be our reality from now on and we need to adjust our living habits.

It’s pretty apparent our medical system is not always prepared for such threats, so it’s up to each of us to do our best not to end up in a hospital. I think baby steps are the answer. We’re not going to change the habits we’ve had for years in a week. But little by little, we can turn our health around. And the first step is to become aware of the danger. Let’s try to remember this word, comorbidity, and truly understand how serious it is. We need to do better because the way we are living now can have tragic consequences. And it would be purely ridiculous to have our lives shortened by something we can easily prevent.