[busterarm]

My whole entire family works in medicine and isn't killing themselves with junk food and bad lifestyles, so even though most of us got COVID-19, none of us had the comorbidities that made it serious. Even among our overweight and elderly.

If somebody's so fat and unhealthy that that they're gassed out from walking off the front porch, I'm not alarmed that a cold virus finished them off. I'm also not out here screaming about COVID, I'm screaming about the importance of diet, exercise and self-control instead.

If they're of advanced age, it's (just) slightly more sad but none of us gets to live forever. Everyone will get cancer too if they live long enough. If you want to radically alter how the rest of us live our lives because you or a family member can't stop shoving McDonalds and cake into your face, I'm not fucking having it.

What I AM sympathetic to are people who have to sequester themselves from society (and did so already in the absence of COVID-19) because they have very serious and usually rare disorders. But then maybe these gain of function labs should think twice before they play with fire and break containment.

As with most things in life, garbage in, garbage out.

[busterarm]

Also I'll say this right here as a former fatty and current fat-shamer and fat-nonacceptant.

The absolute worst thing about ACA is that it made it illegal to charge obese people higher insurance rates. It's basically stealing money out of the rest of our pockets who have to work with you -- and thank God being an unhealthy mess isn't a protected class because I would never hire somebody to work with me who has a terrible lifestyle.

Japan does this right. Your workplace and the public health service makes you get a check up every year and will follow up with you to make sure you're on a plan to get healthier. And they will both encourage you and also nag the shit out of you until you do it. The fact that we don't follow such a practice here I find almost barbaric.

[saltymug76]

Ok

[saltymug76]

Please seek help sad little man.

[busterarm]

We had 16% of all the world's COVID-19 deaths in the US despite only 4% of the world's population.

Even our own CDC said we had that the reason we had the worst impact from the disease because we have the sickest (read: fattest) people.

[seanmcdirmid]

We have more old people with existing problems (eg obesity), COVID ripped through them like crazy. The biggest indicator was age, and our life expectancy was falling behind the rest of the developed world before the pandemic.

[busterarm]

That doesn't make sense. You're saying more people died because of age but we have less old people than the rest of the world and 4x the deaths.

I'm literally talking about obesity being the main problem. We have more old AND obese people, for sure.

The part to focus on is obese, not old.

[seanmcdirmid]

No, I said we had more old people with comorbidities and our life expectancy has been falling behind (not rising) compared to other western developed countries.

If you look at the COVID death rates, age was by far the dominating factor of death, not obesity. But obesity was probably significant in those who died at younger and older ages (though pronounced in older people, since an order of magnitude more died due to COVID than young people). I doubt we are really disagreeing much here, but obesity was a drag on mortality before the pandemic, and will continue to be a problem after.

I wouldn’t take too much stock in comparing USA COVID deaths to the rest of the world, we are really liberal in flagging COVID deaths (eg a 90 year old dies of a heart attack while having COVID is counted as a COVID death), other countries had different standards, especially developing ones without access to as much testing. What we should really focus on is excess deaths overall, and how a life expectancy changed during the pandemic.