[Izkata]

> No one in my family is overweight or has any sort of health issues

> As you are aware, it is kind of a rude question, but also a weird one

The (US) media drilled into us for years that being overweight/obese may as well be a covid death sentence, doing things like stating how many covid hospitalizations/deaths were overweight/obese without context. So it's become very easy for people to jump on that.

The missing context was that if you actually compared like-for-like, using the real rates in the general US population... overweight/obesity has (almost) no effect. They just left that part out so the number sounded high, or compared "obese" in the population to "overweight or obese" in hospitalizations.

[dangwhy]

> overweight/obesity has (almost) no effect.

do you have any reference to this by any chance? I want to search for this but wasn't sure what ' like -for-like' means in this context.

[Izkata]

Here's an example of the reporting from 2021 that's missing context: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/78-of-co...

> 78% of COVID-19 patients hospitalized in the US overweight or obese, CDC finds

> Among 71,491 U.S. adults who were hospitalized with COVID-19, 27.8 percent were overweight and 50.2 were obese, according to the CDC's latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published March 8.

And here's the population statistics (which you'll note aren't in the reporting above): https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm

> Percent of adults aged 20 and over with obesity: 41.9% (2017-March 2020)

> Percent of adults aged 20 and over with overweight, including obesity: 73.6% (2017-2018)

It's not no effect at all, but the effect is pretty small. It definitely doesn't deserve as much attention as it's gotten, especially relative to other risks like age. I think I vaguely remember diabetes was another risk factor barely talked about that has a higher effect than weight.

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> but wasn't sure what ' like -for-like' means in this context

Some of the reporting would include the population context, but would say "78% of hospitalized patients were overweight or obese" and compare it directly to "41% of the US population is obese". It's technically correct but extremely misleading, since the reader will compare those two numbers directly even though they're not the same thing.