[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.