Aside from older age and male gender, obesity is one of the most important risk factors for severe Covid. Compared to those with a healthy BMI, the obese (those with a BMI greater than 30) are about twice as likely to end up in the ICU, and are about 20% more likely to die.
Which raises the question: is obesity a modifiable risk factor? Can obese people reduce their risk of severe Covid by losing a large amount of bodyweight? While the answer might seem obvious, it isn’t necessarily ‘yes’.
Rather than obesity per se, it might be some factor strongly correlated with obesity that predisposes you to severe Covid. Or perhaps obesity leads to permanent changes in the body, so that even once you lose the extra bodyweight, you’re still at higher risk than someone who was never obese to begin with.
It’s certainly possible. Yet a new study suggests that obesity is a modifiable risk factor. Ali Aminian and colleagues examined a cohort of obese people who’d had gastric bypass surgery at particular hospital in Cleveland between 2004 and 2017.
Members of this cohort were matched to similar individuals who’d never had gastric bypass surgery. Matching was based on age, sex, race, BMI at the time of surgery and an index of comorbidities.
The researchers therefore compared two groups: obese people who’d lost weight thanks to gastric bypass surgery; and obese people who’d never had gastric bypass surgery. Note: most members of the surgery group were still obese by the time of the pandemic. Their average BMI was 38, compared to 46 in the control group.
The groups were compared with respect to their Covid outcomes during the first year of the pandemic. What did the researchers find? Their main results are shown in the figure below.
The two groups had almost identical infection rates, as shown in the top-left chart. However, the incidence of severe Covid was much higher in the control group, as shown in the other three charts. This provides relatively strong evidence that losing weight does reduce the risk of severe Covid.
So far, governments have made very little effort to encourage weight loss during the pandemic. (One exception is a recent campaign by the tech-savvy government of El Salvador.) In fact, the net effect of Britain’s lockdowns has been to increase the rate of obesity.
But if Aminian and colleagues’ findings hold up, more emphasis on weight loss is clearly warranted – especially since obesity is risk factor for various medical conditions, not just Covid.
Of course, the main obstacle to promoting weight loss in the current year is not lack of evidence, but concerns around ‘fat-shaming’. To reduce stigma around obesity, you’re supposed to affirm that people can be ‘healthy at any size’. Unfortunately for the activists, this simply isn’t true.
Reducing obesity isn’t a silver bullet in the fight against Covid. But it would certainly help.
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Police forces are the paramilitary wing of the leftist deep state. The Met’ is the worst. Anybody who expects the law to be enforced without fear or favour is delusional.
That may be so. This one just up the river a bit seems to have a habit of assuming that they can’t be antisocial, though.
This issue needs balance.
I am most interested to know what DS readers think of this parallel. How would you deal with this if you were a police officer of the Police Service of Northern Ireland?
And without doubt those who fail to read carefully what I write here will be clicking the downvote icon like there is no tomorrow.
This is an hypothetical but entirely possible scenario – a British citizen in Northern Ireland who supports Irish Republicanism chooses to carry the Irish tricolour and insists on crossing the street in the middle of and during a loyalist Apprentice Day march in the middle of the marching season in NI.
On the one hand we have a man of the Jewish faith openly demonstrating his religious affiliation by wearing a skull cap. And on the other we have a British citizen openly demonstrating being a supporter of Irish Republicanism and insisting, like the British citizen who follows the Jewish faith, of openly demonstrating his political affiliation.
In either case there are without doubt concerns some of those demonstrating – but not all – might be prone to break the law either with abuse or worse in response.
On the other hand, in London, was the police officer concerned about avoiding a situation in which he and his colleagues might be unable to protect that one man of the Jewish faith in the midst of a large crowd of pro-Palestinian demonstrators?
Would a police officer in NI be similarly concerned in that parallel situation?
Was this this London England case one of a police officer failing to communicate in a diplomatic way reasonable concerns and so appearing to act in a high-handed and ?
What if in either case the police officer said – “I am concerned we cannot protect you if you choose to cross this street as you suggest you are intent on doing in the middle of this demonstration. The chance a breach of the peace will ensue is almost certain at the least with threatening insulting or abusive behaviour from this crowd and possibly violence.
So if you insist on this course of behaviour, despite the circumstances, I am my colleagues may have to act against you to maintain the peace and protect you from the likely consequences of your actions.”
That seems to be the gist of what happened in London according to the quotes in this article like: “Your presence here is antagonising a large group of people that we can’t deal with all of them if they attack you… because your presence is antagonising them.”
We don’t have a police force to run diplomatic missions in Palestine. A main aspect of their job is keeping the peace.
And we do have religious and political no-go areas in the UK – and Belfast is one clear example – literally with walls to separate communities. They have walls in Israel for similar purposes to separate Israeli areas from Palestinian areas.
In this London situation we have a man using the demonstration to make a political point and then taking advantage of the use of the officer’s “openly Jewish” description to complain.
So what if the police officer was in the hypothetical but possible Belfast situation and said the republican sympathiser was being “openly Republican“.
So here we need a third-handed person to argue the matter further.
The complaint is of the Met Police creating “no-go zones for Jews” and about the claim his actions were “antagonising a large group of people” and of “the threat of antisemitic violence” and that “no part of London should be unsafe”.
But in NI there are “no-go zones for” Catholics and Protestants. The example of the hypothetical republican sympathiser would without any doubt be “antagonising a large group of people” and of “the threat of” sectarian “violence” and that “no part of” Derry [or Londonderry] “should be unsafe” but that is not true either.
So how would you deal with that situation and what is different from the London England example?
I have lived and suffered with this kind of discrimination in NI. One might expect that nothing should happen (that is the law!), but I wouldn’t dare try it. The same in London, we need arrests for not following the actual law, it is intimidating behaviour at its worst.
Well he gets minimal sympathy from me because I remember this guy as the one who got Tommy Robinson forcibly removed ( by 30 officers, restrained and pepper-sprayed then banned ) from a protest when he did precisely nothing wrong. We don’t have amnesia! Karma’s a bitch and this hypocrite deserves a dose of his own medicine. My sympathies lie with the whole Jewish community, bar this gonk. Falter, and the rest of us, know full well where the threat is coming from and it certainly isn’t from the likes of Tommy Robinson, who just showed up that day in a journalist capacity, or other patriots.
”That Jewish man @petercardwell
is the exact same Jewish man who had the police remove @TRobinsonNewEra
from London a few months ago because he said Tommys presence might upset people. Now he’s upset because he’s just been told the exact same thing about himself. Irony.”
https://twitter.com/MarkChaloner9/status/1781612435276710188
I have to be honest, this guy nails it as far as I’m concerned;
”Message from the constabulary regarding openly Jewish people.”
https://twitter.com/andrewlawrence/status/1781595009520669124
I check out Andrew Lawrence’s post each evening before tuning in to GB News. His stuff is always ‘on the money.’. Same for Katie Hopkins too, love her or loathe her, she speaks her mind. The fact that the pair of them have been royally shafted for doing so in the past is a badge of honour.
The heads-up re’ Falter is interesting. Keep up the sleuthing on our behalf.Thanks.
This from Tommy’s Twitter. I won’t post a link because it’s a high security account and people won’t be able to access it if they don’t have an account themselves.
”Look at the amazement on @GideonFalter
face, that if he remains there, he’ll be arrested.
Shocked by the same authoritarian policing that he encouraged and celebrated against me.
He had me arrested, subsequently banned from London, when there was no breach of the peace, no opposition.”
Many good responses in the comments and many Jews, like there was when it happened, calling out this Gideon Falter as being bang out of order and how he doesn’t speak for the Jewish community;
”Police officer: “you are quite openly Jewish”, so that is the breach of the peace.
Same as when you are quite openly a proud British person and that is the breach of the peace.
The police basically admit they can’t control the mob and therefore they enforce the mob rules before the mob can.”
”He made the mistake of thinking he spoke for all Jews when he had you arrested, myself and many others who were there that day were glad you were and wanted you to stay.”
”Not all Jewish people were against you taking part in the march.”
Thanks for that Mogs
Being openly football-minded in Cheshire is risky too.
I don’t remember any Jewish people protesting that the Met were making “No-Go Areas for Englishmen” in 2013, when two Englishmen were arrested for walking through a “Muslim Area” of London:
EDL leaders arrested over Woolwich walk – Channel 4 News
“EDL co-leaders Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll are arrested in east London during a planned walk to commemorate Lee Rigby, the soldier hacked to death in Woolwich.”
“The Metropolitan police said on Friday that anyone trying to march to Woolwich would be arrested.”
After their arrest for walking down a street in their own capital city of London, the pair said they still hoped to walk to Woolwich to lay flowers.
In fact, after Fusilier Lee Rigby’s death, when UK Muslims loudly claimed victimhood instead of condemning the terrorists…
“In the London Borough of Hackney, the Stamford Hill Shomrim, a Jewish volunteer Neighbourhood Patrol Group, made an offer of help to the local Muslim community which was welcomed and subsequently commended by the Hackney Police Borough Commander Chief Superintendent.”
The two Muslim Terrorists were given nearly a quarter of a £million pounds of British Taxpayers’ money for legal aid to challenge their life sentences, which were fortunately rejected by the courts.
Khan’s Sharia London. Time for the Home Sec to implement emergency powers and stop this wickedness. But that takes courage, integrity and leadership, sadly lacking in government ministers.
Meanwhile Cameron is bullying Israel to allow the Red Cross access to Hamas terrorists. This authorises their pay for slay stipends from the PA. I wrote Chris Heaton-Harris my MP to object. He didnt reply. I wrote again, which he also ignored.
It’s obvious our government is either complicit with Islamists or running scared.
https://off-guardian.org/2024/04/20/war-in-the-new-normal-slaughtering-your-proles-for-convenience-fun-profit/
An excellent appraisal of the state we are in.
As each day passes I become more and more convinced that George Orwell’s ‘1984‘ is actually being used as the Manifesto of the Davos Deviants. It really is their play-book.
I see. Keeping some people safe is the excuse to remove freedom of movement, eh? This is extreme totalitarianism! Britain is descending to be the lowest country in the World. It really is time to leave.
Enough of the marches. Let them go Hyde Park and have a rally instead. This taking over of London every Saturday has got to breaking either a real law or one of the new pretend offences such as ‘he looked at me in a funny way,’ or something.
The Chief Executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, walking around London after attending a synagogue, happened to find himself in the path of a pro-Palestinian march and, having no desire to be near it, crossed the road to get away from it. And somebody was there to record the incident. Really?
What synagogue did he attend? A search suggests that the two nearest are Bevis Marks and Marble Arch, both well over a mile away. Why did he have to cross the road? There are plenty of streets leading off Aldwych. And is it his custom to walk round London on the sabbath? Surely he was not carrying money on his person so far outside the Hendon eruv?
I don’t believe it. This was a manufactured incident.
I see on GB News this morning the silly Eammon Holmes saying that the Police were only doing their job and asking “Why was that man there”? Eamoon is implying he was only there to cause trouble? ——–Eamonn are you kidding me mate? Are you really telling me that wherever a bunch of Palestinian supporters are marching that anyone “Openly Jewish” should scurry away around a corner with their tail between their legs and hide? Eamonn that is exactly what you are saying mate.