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On his blog, Dr. Joseph Mercola explains the dangers of mechanical ventilation and the obesity that increases its potential use on COVID-19 patients. He writes (abridged):
A July 25, 2021, article1 by Joel Hirschhorn on Trial Site News highlights what he refers to as a “missed public health opportunity.” Hirschhorn is a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, and a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and America’s Frontline Doctors.
Even though we’ve known for well over a year that obesity is one of the most common and most significant risk factors for COVID-19 (aside from age, which you have no control over), public health authorities have ignored the issue and failed to provide guidance on how to reduce excess weight.
In summary, obesity increases your risk of severe illness and triples your risk of hospitalization. It impairs your immune function, decreases your lung capacity and increases your risk of ending up on invasive mechanical ventilation — a treatment strategy shown to kill more than half of all patients. Obesity is also associated with chronic inflammation that can disrupt thrombogenic responses to pathogens.
According to the CDC, modeling suggests 30.2% of all American adults hospitalized for COVID-19 up until November 18, 2020, could be attributed to obesity,7 and the greater your body mass index (BMI) the higher your risks for a poor outcome gets. The connection between obesity and COVID-19 is particularly strong in people younger than 65.8
A study published April 9, 2020, reported that obesity doubled the risk of hospitalization in patients under the age of 60,14 even if the individual had no other obesity-related health problems. Since then, many more studies have been published showing the same trend.
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