According to this 73.6% of adults over 20 in the US are classified as overweight or obese, so 78% of Covid hospitalizations being overweight or obese is not at all surprising.

This means that overweight and obese people are roughly 5.8% more likely to be hospitalized with Covid than people who are not overweight or obese. Hardly the slam dunk you're implying it is. (Of course I'm potentially making a mistake by excluding under 20s without knowing if the covid hospitalization statistic you're mentioning also excludes them, but taking that into account is too much research/math for today - what percentage of the US pop is < 20 years old?).

(As a side note, that article is awful (and I assume the source of your mistake) - it seems to imply that "obese" and "overweight or obese" are the same thing, except the former is 41.9% of the population and the latter is 73.6%. Not sure if intentional misuse of statistics, or just incompetence).

My God.

I did not think it was that high.

I had thought “ehh 50%” based simply on who I see walking around at Costco, and you’re right shame on me for not looking up the relevant statistics to fact check CNBC. That’s a legit public health catastrophe. We’re slow walking into a health case disaster if this doesn’t change.

I agree with your statement in the small (yes, get fit, try to motivate friends and family to do the same), but it's not useful to moralize about what-if on a population level in my opinion, and it is tantamount to blaming the victims of the pandemic for bad outcomes. Especially before the vaccines, many young and healthy people died or experienced very bad outcomes, and it still happens, though the vaccines have helped a ton in this regard.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

I’m not really convinced “long Covid” is something to worry about for people that aren’t already at risk for having bad outcomes from the disease in the first place. I’m open to reading something to convince me that it’s different from being tired for a week or two after getting other respiratory viruses. This [1] is from May. I’m not entirely convinced it’s even real.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/search-long-covid

No?

Okay then.

I am double vaccinated (Astra-Zenaca) and have had a single booster (Moderna).

I was on the floor in the foetal position at my worst, while my spouse just had a cough and very bad headaches.

My spouse and I had the same vaccination history, yet her experience with covid was much milder.