Posts Tagged ‘COVID-19’

It is a jarring headline. U.S. health systems cost the most and perform the worst in comparison to ten other wealthy countries. In fact, the comparison is not even close. So what does it mean to be dead last in healthcare? Norway, the Netherlands, and Australia have the top performing health systems. The list also […]

Mandates are very much in the news this week. We’re hearing a lot of angst about vaccine mandates and mask mandates. In some situations, it seems there’s not much room for debate about what to do. Yet we find that even when reality is unyielding, people still have choices to make. So in between the […]

Is it helpful to use shame for health promotion? The impulse is certainly strong. Shame and blame have been consistent threads through years of grappling with the health impact of obesity. Along the same line, we’re seeing shame and blame trotted out for the unvaccinated in the U.S. as a the Delta variant produces a […]

People are dying again. Deaths from COVID-19 are rising in the U.S. for the first time in months. This follows an upward trend in COVID cases that began in early July. Hospitalizations started rising soon after that. And all of this is happening most in places where vaccination rates are low and among people who […]

You might think that weight gain during the pandemic is simply a matter of fact. The editor of the Harvard Health Letter tells us it’s widespread. Speculation started early in the pandemic. With everyone cooped up at home, people spoke with certainty and derision about the quarantine 15. Or pandemic pounds. One paper even proclaimed […]

Stats are rolling in to put numbers on the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year we’ve just survived (apologies to Judith Viorst). Those stats tell us just how bad things had gotten. Life expectancy dropped more than ever since the World Wars. Deaths from drug overdoses jumped by 30 percent. It was a year […]

Familiarity can breed contempt or it can bring comfort. A new position statement about COVID-19 vaccines from the Obesity Society brings us comfort. In fact, the more we learn about these COVID vaccines, the more we like. They work well – even in people with obesity and other risk factors. What’s more, the effect on […]

New data on deaths for 2020 from CDC present a stark picture. The rate of deaths due to heart disease rose by more than three percent in 2020. This has happened only one other time in the last 20 years. In 2015, the death rate rose by less than a percent. Even more dramatically, the […]

Getting the COVID-19 vaccine is a no-brainer, right? Especially for people living with obesity. So is vaccine hesitancy a problem for us? It turns out that the answer is not a simple yes or no. Vaccine hesitancy is no more and no less of a problem for people living with obesity than it is for […]

A new paper in Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism shows an association between obesity and the risk for long COVID. People with moderate or severe obesity have a 28 to 30 percent higher risk of hospital stays after the acute phase of COVID in this study. But it’s not the first study noting this link. In […]