Study finds severe obesity raises risk of COVID-19 death

The nation’s top infec- tious disease expert says the U.S. could see significant steps toward a return to the pre-pandemic normal, even before the country reaches coronavirus herd immunity.

Dr. Anthony Fauci says best estimates when enough people are immune to end the outbreak range between 70-85% of the population — a figure expected to be attained by late summer or early fall.

He says as the pace of vaccination ramps up and the most vulnerable to the virus are protected, some government restrictions could be lifted.

Said Fauci: “You don’t have to wait until you get full herd immunity to get a really profound effect on what you can do.”

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky cautioned only about 10% of the popula- tion is fully vaccinated, but her agency anticipated loos- ening federal guidelines as more people receive shots.

Virus origins could be known in ‘few years’

One of the leaders of the recent World Health Organization-led mission to China to investigate the origins of the coronavirus expects find- ing out “fairly soon, within the next few years” what started the pandemic.

In a press briefing, Peter Daszak estimated collective scientific research could pin down how animals carrying

COVID-19 might have infected the first people in Wuhan.

“There was a conduit from Wuhan to the provinces where in South China, where the closest relative viruses to (the coronavirus) are found in bats,” says Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance. He says the wildlife trade seemed to be the most likely explanation of COVID19 arriving in Wuhan, where the first human cases were detected last December.

That hypothesis, Daszak says, was “the one that’s most strongly supported both on the WHO (and) the China side.”

Daszak and his co-authors are set to release a report, as early as next week, on the initial conclusions of their recent mission to Wuhan.

T hey concluded it was “extremely unlikely” the pandemic was the result of a laboratory accident.

West Virginia finds 168 virus deaths

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice announced an estimated 168 coronavirus deaths went unreported.

Justice says officials discovered that 70 deaths — mostly hospitals and nursing homes — weren’t reported to the state’s health department. The Republican governor on Monday had heralded a sharp drop in COVID-19 deaths since the beginning of the year, metrics health officials cited to support the governor easing restrictions on businesses.

“This is absolutely not acceptable,” Justice said. “I’m really sorry.”

Dr. Ayne Amjad, the state’s health officer, said officials are waiting to find out if there are more unreported deaths. She blamed it on facilities not filling out death reports online to the state’s health department in a timely matter.

The health department’s public data currently shows 2,330 total deaths — which does not include the 168.

All adults can get vaccine in Utah

Utah’s governor says all adults in the state will be eligible to receive COVID19 vaccines on April 1.

A spokeswoman for Governor Spencer Cox says state officials expect to have 1.5 million doses by April 10, when Utah’s statewide mask order will be lifted.

Mask orders will remain in place for schools and large gatherings. Utah also reported the first death of a child in the state because of COVID-19 on Tuesday. The state’s number of newly confirmed coronavirus cases and virus-related hospitalizations have continued to decrease since January.

Puerto Rico’s public schools re-open

Public schools across Puerto Rico are reopening for the first time in nearly a year, with officials reporting scarce attendance amid COVID19 concerns. Of the island’s 858 public schools, 95 were authorized to reopen.

Over the past year, many scientific teams around the world have reported that obese people who contract the coronavirus are espe- cially likely to become dangerously ill.

Now, a large new study, of nearly 150,000 adults at more than 200 hospitals across the United States, paints a more detailed picture of the connection between weight and COVID19 outcomes.

The study, performed by a team of researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has confirmed that obesity significantly increases the risk for hospitalization and death among those who con- tract the virus. And among those who are obese, the risk increases as a patient’s body mass index, or BMI, a ratio of weight to height, increases. Patients with a BMI of 45 or higher, which cor- responds to severe obesity, were 33% more likely to be hospitalized and 61% more likely to die than those who were at a healthy weight, the researchers found.

“The findings of the study highlight the serious clin- ical public health implications of elevated BMI, and they suggest the continued need for intensive management of COVID-19 illness, especially among patients affected by severe obesity,” said the lead author, Lyudmyla Kompaniyets, a health economist at the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity at the CDC.

But t he rela t ions h ip between weight and outcomes is nuanced. COVID- 19 patients who were underweight were also more likely to be hospitalized than those who were at a healthy weight, although they were not more likely to be admitted to the intensive care unit or to die.

Kompaniyets and her colleagues used a database of COVID-19 cases to identify 148,494 adults who received a diagnosis of the disease at American hospitals from last March to December. They calculated the BMI of each patient and looked for correlations between BMI and a variety of serious outcomes, including hospitalization, ICU admission, mechanical ventilation and death.

They found that obesity, which is defined as a BMI of 30 or higher, increased the risk of both hospitalization and death. Patients with a BMI of 30 to 34.9 were just 7% more likely to be hospitalized and 8% more likely to die than people who were at a healthy weight, but the risks increased sharply as

BMI rose.

Providing evidence for this kind of “dose response” relationship makes the study particularly compelling, said Dr. Anne Dixon, director of pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Vermont Medical Center, who was not involved in the research. “What it shows is the more severe your obesity, the worse the effect is. And the fact that goes up stepwise with increasing levels of obesity, I think, adds sort of biological plausibility to the relationship between obesity and the outcome.”

The connection between obesity and poor outcomes was strongest among patients under 65, but it held even for older adults. Previous, smaller studies have not found strong links between obesity a nd severity of COVID-19 in older adults.