In early April, Edna McCloud woke up to find her hands tied to her hospital bed.She had spent the past four days on a ventilator in a hospital in St. Louis County, Missouri, thrashing and kicking under sedation as she battled a severe case of COVID-19."They told me, 'You were a real fighter
She had spent the past four days on a ventilator in a hospital in St. Louis County, Missouri, thrashing and kicking under sedation as she battled a severe case of COVID-19.
“A new pandemic is now laying itself on top of an ongoing epidemic,” said Dr. Christy Richardson, an endocrinologist at SSM Health in Missouri. Regarding obesity’s effects on infectious disease, she said, “We are still learning, but it’s not difficult to understand how the body can become overwhelmed.”
Experts said part of obesity’s threat is mechanical: Large amounts of fat, for instance, can compress the lower parts of the lungs, making it harder for them to expand when people breathe in. The blood of people with obesity also seems to be more prone to clotting, plugging up delicate vessels throughout the body and starving tissues of oxygen.
These aberrant early responses can have severe long-term consequences as well, said Melinda Beck, who studies how nutrition affects immunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The constant inflammation, she said, can wear away at the immune system’s ability to generate a long-lived population of “memory” cells, which store intelligence about past encounters with pathogens.
Johnson & Johnson, whose coronavirus vaccine candidate entered late-stage clinical trials this month, is enrolling people with obesity, according to a company spokesman, Jake Sargent. The company “will have the opportunity to evaluate this question during development,” he said. A few months after McCloud got sick, her younger sister, Elaine Franklin, 62, began to experience terrible headaches. When she spoke to family members, they asked why she sounded so out of breath. “My son said, ‘Mama, you need to go to urgent care,’” Franklin recalled. A test soon revealed that she, too, had caught the coronavirus.
Even medical professionals show bias when caring for patients with excess weight, said Dr. Benjamin Singer, a pulmonologist at the University of Michigan and an author on a recent review of obesity’s influence on immunity. Studies have shown that doctors tend to be more dismissive of patients with obesity and may brush off worrisome symptoms as irrelevant side effects of their weight.
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