Ask the Expert: Lung Cancer in Women [Video]

Please discuss the intersection of obesity and Covid-19. 

You know, long before the Covid pandemic happened, we’ve been struggling globally with an obesity pandemic. Over 40% of U.S adults have obesity, so it’s a disease that touches all of our lives. Add on top of that the Covid pandemic, which you know we all just lived through — we know how it affected all of us in so many complicated ways — um, the combined effect of these concurrent pandemics was really profound. The Covid pandemic exposed weaknesses in our healthcare systems and worsened a lot of pre-existing health disparities. I mean this was especially true for people living with obesity with Covid. We saw that obesity was an independent predictor of worse Covid outcomes. People with obesity had about a 50% increased risk of death due to Covid. This became a huge area of research, and it was found that the adipose, or fat tissue, itself was …