Masks and spacing never go out of style. As well as vaccines which continue to be highly recommended. But to dodge the Covid now it is also important to keep an eye on your weight. A study conducted by the English specialized site The Conversation and published on The lancet diabetes & endocrinology unearthed a connection between contagion cases and a person’s pounds. In particular it was found that people obese and those underweight have a better chance of contracting the virus compared to those who are in an appropriate weight range.
I study
Obesity is measured using a body mass index, the BMI, which is calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by their height in meters squared. A person with a BMI below 18.5 is considered underweight, the range 18.5-25 sets the optimum weight, over 25 is considered overweight, and over 30 obese. It should be noted that the research was conducted close to the launch of the vaccination campaign on a global scale and, not surprisingly, on the basis of the data, people with a BMI of 40 or higher were included among the subjects most at risk and, therefore, among those to be granted priority access to vaccine.
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As anticipated, the research was conducted on anonymous medical records of over 9 million people aged 18 years or older in England. The data cover the period from 8 December 2020 (the date on which the first vaccine against Covid was administered in United Kingdom) as of November 17, 2021. During this period, 566,461 out of 9 million people tested positive for Covid, of which 32,808 were hospitalized and 14,389 died. Analyzing the various intersections of the data, the study revealed that the vaccines were highly effective against severe outcomes in all categories of BMI, after the second and third dose, but with interesting variations. If, for example, the percentages of contracting the virus in a severe way were reduced (70%) in an almost identical way between weight, overweight and obesity, in the case of underweight the percentage of effectiveness dropped to 50% for hospitalizations and 40% for deaths. Circulating the analysis instead to the unvaccinated, underweight and obese people showed a significantly higher risk of contracting the virus than people with a normal weight.