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Comment by javagram | Hacker News Reader

Look at your cdc link and it proves my point. I never said obesity wasn’t a risk factor, just that covid is plenty dangerous to the non obese as well.

“ More than 900,000 adult COVID-19 hospitalizations occurred in the United States between the beginning of the pandemic and November 18, 2020. Models estimate that 271,800 (30.2%) of these hospitalizations were attributed to obesity.6”

This is from your link - even if the government put everyone in concentration camps and forced them to lose weight, it would do nothing for the other 70%

Meanwhile vaccines are about 80-90% effective against hospitalization and death.

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> Meanwhile vaccines are about 80-90% effective against hospitalization and death

And falling. Remember how people were parading around 95%?

Just like ‘99% of people in hospital are unvaccinated’. While now in some areas it’s ‘70% vaccinated’.

Vaccines are not a magic bullet and delaying covid using measures that make people fat is not a smart move. Not to mention stealing 1.5% of peoples lifetime to delay a disease that less than 1% would die from.

Obesity hasn’t changed that much. Around 70% of Americans were overweight or obese before the pandemic. Diet is the most important factor in weight gain or weight loss. And except for a few dumb months at the beginning, parks and outdoor areas are open for recreation. I’ve been running 4x a week for the whole pandemic without issue where I live, nothing stopped people from exercising if they wanted to follow the health advice that they’ve been hearing for decades.

Vaccines aren’t a magic bullet. But they’re the most cost effective item we have. You cite some irrelevant statistics but appear to agree with my statement that the vaccines remain more than 80% effective against death.

The vaccine costs less than $100 and takes about an hour of time to do. There is no way to lose weight that cheaply or quickly and as a result people continue to ignore government advice and health campaigns urging them to do so.

Moreover, losing weight does not stop you from catching or spreading COVID at all, whereas the vaccines have been shown to reduce transmission.

I did not say anything about your statement ‘that the vaccines remain more than 80% effective against death’ apart from that being down from the claim it was 95% effective. And dropping.

But from the typical ‘I endured lockdown just fine’ tripe it’s clear what you think:

I have no problems with restricting others from doing things I don’t care about and I think it’s fine to force others to adopt my position. Because I think I know better than them.

And those first few months of peoples basic human rights being taken away based on ideas that clearly were never going to work? Oh, they were just a few dumb months. Pfft who cares. We’re over that now, there’s a new battle to fight. Who thinks about these measures that were going to be the end-all solution? There’s a new measure that’s going to be the end-all solution. To force on others because clearly we know what’s best for them.

> Vaccines aren’t a magic bullet.

That's not what the narrative says. It's earier (and popular) to say "it's a pandemic of the unvaxinated" than to tell the truth. That is, diet, lifestyle and personal health matter. They impact day to day heatlth, and they impact your ability to recover from unplanned health challenges (e.g., car accident, Covid, etc.)

The idea that there is zero connection between diet + lifestyle and health is completely unscientific. To promote / deny that during a pandemic is insane.

> More than 900,000 adult COVID-19 hospitalizations occurred in the United States between the beginning of the pandemic and November 18, 2020. Models estimate that 271,800 (30.2%) of these hospitalizations were attributed to obesity.6”

Hospitalization is a deceptive metric. What's more important is: long term hospitalizations, as well as higher use of treatment (e.g., ICU).

That's that data needed. This other stat - like so many Covid stats - is too high level. The Devil is in the details.

Remember the swiss cheese model? Or lockdowns to manage the curve? Those 30% could be reduced. Also whatever percentage had bad cases because of vitamin D deficiency. Yet no messaging on staying healthy at all...

Because since not everyone can improve their immune function, nobody should, right? Messaging otherwise would be ableist or give people an idea that they could do something aside from hunkering down, and that's more important than reducing hospitalizations and saving lives...

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