Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Meets Obesity: Strong Association between the Global Overweight Population and COVID-19 Mortality
Jingzhou Wang, The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 151, Issue 1, January 2021,
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has infected 38 million individuals and claimed at least 1 million lives across the globe since it originated in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 (1). While SARS-CoV-2 is highly contagious and lethal, with a case fatality rate of 2.8% based on confirmed cases and deaths to date, different countries have reported varying degree of mortality. We investigated whether such difference in mortality may be explained by obesity, a quiet pandemic that has been striking the globe in the last few decades.
Early studies have identified that obese patients were more likely to test positive for COVID-19 (2). Furthermore, obese patients had a 3.4-fold odds of developing severe COVID-19 compared with normal-weight patients (3). Elderly individuals are most susceptible to COVID-19, but increased risk of intensive care unit admission has been reported in younger patients who are obese (4). Here, by integrating BMI data from the WHO 2016 report (5) and COVID-19 data from worldometers.info (1), we show that the prevalence of overweight [BMI (kg/m2) ≥25] population per country is significantly associated with the number of deaths per million population on a global scale (adjusted R2: 0.20; P < 0.0001), in which countries with a larger proportion of overweight individuals have a greater number of deaths from COVID-19 (Figure 1). When the association was analyzed by continent, it was statistically significant in North/Central America and Asia/Oceania and showed a trend in other continents.