According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent data, the “prevalence of obesity was 42.4 percent” in our population in 2017-2018, increasing from 30.5 percent in the years 1999-2000.
The demographics with the highest rates of obesity are non-Hispanic blacks (49.6 percent) and Hispanics 44.8 percent).
Why are these statistics important? Because now, obesity is responsible for sickening and killing more of us but not in the usual way — via heart disease and diabetes.
Rather, a major new study has found that obesity is the leading “chronic” condition that has led to hospitalizations for the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) in New York City, according to ZDNet.
While age is still the largest determining factor, obesity is the biggest co-morbidity, scientists at New York University have discovered.
“The chronic condition with the strongest association with critical illness was obesity, with a substantially higher odds ratio than any cardiovascular or pulmonary disease," write lead author Christopher M. Petrilli of the NYU Grossman School and colleagues in a paper, "Factors associated with hospitalization and critical illness among 4,103 patients with COVID-19 disease in New York City."
ZDNet notes further:
Among other things, the presence of obesity in the study points to a potentially important role of heightened inflammation in patients -- a phenomenon that has been a topic of much speculation in numerous studies of the disease.
Petrilli and colleagues at the Grossman School, along with doctors at the NYU Langone Health center, studied the electronic patient records of 4,103 individuals who tested positive for COVID-19 in the New York City healthcare system between March 1 and April 2.
It’s “the largest case series from the United States to date,” the authors write.
A national epidemic has now fallen prey to a global pandemic
They added that they were motivated by their desire to understand “which patients are most at risk for hospitalization,” which they note is, of course, “crucial for many reasons,” such as how to triage COVID patients and anticipate future medical requirements. (Related: COVID-19 takes hold among the homeless in Los Angeles.)
Now, the fact that blacks are the most obese, per capita, matters as well because recent reports state that coronavirus is disproportionately affecting that demographic — which, naturally, Democrats and their Left-wing media propagandists have turned into an issue of racism (like a virus has the ability to understand such concepts).
Last week the racial disparities that have accompanied the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. became a major story. Officials in St. Louis, Detroit and a large swath of states reported that African American populations had been hit especially hard by the virus.
A look at the data helps explain why. Behind the well-known daily numbers of the pandemic — the cases, hospitalizations and deaths — a mix of geography, socioeconomics and health factors make COVID-19, the disease associated with the virus, particularly dangerous for some minority groups.
The network went on to concentrate mostly on the racial component and the ‘socioeconomic status’ of blacks — how they don’t have as much health insurance, good jobs, etc.
But the science says those components have little to do with the fact that obesity plays a major factor in hospitalizations. That isn’t ‘racist’ and it has nothing to do with ‘socioeconomic’ status; most everyone who is obese, no matter their ethnicity, isn’t starving to death, that’s for sure. They just have poorer eating habits.
In any event, a national epidemic has now fallen prey to a global pandemic, as the research shows. If this doesn’t spur people to start living healthier lives, no matter who they are, then nothing will.
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