Fears over child obesity and mental health

DERBY will likely see a spike in child obesity and mental health issues due to Covid-19 lockdown – but more people have quit smoking to fight the virus, the city’s health chief has said.

Dr Robyn Dewis, Derby City Council’s public health director, spoke to councillors this week about the impact the virus has had on the community.

She also shed light on the challenges of combating the virus in the early stages of the pandemic when the city had next to no information about where it specifically was spreading and who it was affecting.

Dr Dewis said: “We don’t have access to the data yet, but we have had reports of increased access of smoking cessation services.

“There has been a really strong message that stopping smoking, if you’re a smoker, is a really positive thing to do to reduce the impact of Covid and that does appear to have been a driver bringing some people forward to stop smoking.”

However, there has been a slew of long-term negative impacts of the virus on Derby’s communities.

Dr Dewis said: “From an obesity perspective we are not expecting such a positive response. We are awaiting the child weight measurement programme in schools and it is a reality that children have been at home and those that had a poor diet previously will probably continue to have that poor diet.

“There is a likelihood that they will have had less physical activity because they have been out of school and haven’t been out and about over this period and so there is a real risk that obesity from children up to adults will have increased over this time.”

Dr Dewis continued: “It is also the indirect health effects, thinking about the financial consequences of this period. “Thinking about the individuals who have been on furlough or reduced incomes or will be perhaps being made redundant over this period and the impact we know loss of income will have on their health. “The impact on mental health can’t be underestimated over the winter period as we move into the darker period and also there are festivals coming up, Diwali (November 14) and Christmas, that will not be celebrated in ways that they have in previous years and that will be incredibly challenging for some people. “There are the direct impacts of Covid, there are 324 individuals in the city who we have lost to coronavirus. “Along with that there is also emerging evidence of a condition called long Covid which has a really difficult recovery period and affects young individuals as well as older individuals and is almost like a post-viral fatigue.

“Then there are the mental health impacts of bereavement. There have also been indirect impacts on mental health as a result of isolation.

“We know that there was a really significant impact on some city communities, we do know that the Pakistani community were significantly impacted really early on.

“We also know that people who were older and men were also significantly impacted.”

Local councils did not get patient identifiable data on cases of Covid-19 confirmed in the city until late in the summer, months after the start of the pandemic.

On top of this public health officials in the county and city were getting largely incomplete data on the jobs being carried out by those who had tested positive.