“ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
It is the coercion / loss of livelihood and other threats, that are getting people up in arms (figuratively, and who knows, someday in real life)
Imagine if various establishments used a weight/health card where one is scored on some heuristic, and allowed access.
Just look at intellectuals like Noam Chomsky's prescriptions on how to treat the unvaccinated...
People were up in arms and fearmongering over the vaccine since 2020. This isn’t about coercion - there’s a reason the same people typically don’t get vaccinated themselves. If they believed in the effectiveness of the vaccine they’d be vaxxed themselves (like Republican Governors and Fox News tv hosts).
I personally know someone who thought the vaccine had a good chance of killing me and other acquaintances who took it, all because he read some random posts on the net.
It’s perfectly possible to be for vaccinations and against mandates.
Most people don’t fall into that category though. The “people” who are up in arms usually cite stuff like the vaccines rewriting DNA, being unsafe, untested, Nuremberg violations, “did my own research” and a hundred other reasons they found online to claim the vaccine is unsafe or ineffective.
This is the straw man
They didn't treat it like the Black Death; if anything, death estimates were way too low.
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/09/830664814/fauci-says-u-s-coro...
> The final toll currently "looks more like 60,000 than the 100,000 to 200,000" that U.S. officials previously estimated, Fauci said.
As for obesity and age, they were pretty clear on that:
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/practices/fauci-offers-upda...
> "It’s so clear that the overwhelming weight of serious disease and mortality is on those who are elderly and those with a serious comorbidity: heart disease, chronic lung disease, diabetes, obesity, respiratory difficulties," said Anthony Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
> "There will be outliers, as we’ve seen with influenza, [a person] who is young and healthy who winds up getting COVID-19, [gets] seriously ill and dies," Fauci said in a taped interview with Howard Bauchner, M.D., editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "But if you look at the weight of the data the risk group is very, very clear."
You're getting mad at imaginary experts.
In addition to flat out lying about that Chinese lab, of course.
Any programmer knows “that should take a couple hours” may take just a few minutes or wind up taking days. We’ve all been there, despite being experts in our field.
At no point did I ever feel public health experts portrayed a COVID case as a death sentence. Much of the early uncertainty was whether the CFR was 1% versus 2% or so.
But when it later turns out it didn’t work, well we can never be sure now can we?
But even if common sense makes it clear that the ideas of these experts are unachievable and are never going to work, like the ‘covid 0’ plans and the ‘15 days to stop the spread’ plans, or the doomsday predictions that are clearly never going to come true, I can’t choose not to suffer the consequences.
These experts are a lot less than perfect. Some of them are more like politicians then like scientists. And the ones that are more like scientists frequently contradict each other, which is perfectly fine but should show people with common sense that it is not the brightest idea to blindly trust anything they say.
BTW covid is plenty dangerous to non obese as well.
The vaccine shot actually works well and is incredibly easy to use compared to a grueling year long weight loss and sustaining it for a lifetime, for most people.