CDC: 61% of Teenagers Hospitalized for Covid-19 Had Obesity | Hacker News Reader

CDC: 61% of Teenagers Hospitalized for Covid-19 Had Obesity

reason.com

9 pointsnradov13 comments

I wish we'd put half as much money and effort into fighting obesity as we do fighting COVID, or myriad other things. It's not like it's less dangerous; I'd rather get COVID than diabetes. That's not to minimize the dangers of COVID, I just think we severely underrate the danger of diabetes.

We're paying people to get vaccinated. Why not pay people to lose weight, or pay for something more indirect like joining a recreational sports league? Being at a healthy weight is like a semi-effective vaccine against an incredible range of illnesses from heart disease to infectious agents like COVID.

I also wish we would start requiring cigarette-like warnings on some foods. High sugar foods should absolutely require a label like "eating a diet high in sugar increases the risk of diabetes, which doubles the risk of heart attack and stroke, and can even result in limbs being amputated". There should probably be something similar for foods that are high in calories but low in nutrients like your typical pizza.

Or perhaps it would be better to provide an easier to digest version of the nutrition facts. Maybe something graphic, like 3 pie charts. Each food gets rated on how much of your daily fruits/vegetables, protein, and "junk food budget" it consumes, and that gets shown to consumers as a pie chart for each.

Obesity is hard to fight once it sets in, so I think it's important to make the information accessible to children so that they can make healthy choices too. A child isn't likely to read the nutrition facts, but they could probably be taught that things that have this pie chart filled up and the others empty is not a healthy food.

> Or perhaps it would be better to provide an easier to digest version of the nutrition facts. Maybe something graphic, like 3 pie charts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutri-Score

Can we imagine a health care system that had the goal of maximizing human health, while keeping costs in check and staying ethical?

The reasoning is straightforward in my mind: rather than trying to solve every problem, find all the variables that you can control ethically, and see which ones have the greatest positive impact.

Obesity is probably #1 or #2: if you assume humans have free will, and that we can override addiction, and that eating the "wrong" food makes you obese, and not exercising exacerbates the problem, it seems like a health system should work to limit people from eating "wrong" foods and making them exercise more. The outcome of this would be a healthier population, saving large amounts of health care costs, which could be reinvested into other problems, like the 2nd and 3rd largest risk factors.

Unpacking everything above you quickly realize that we can't agree that humans have free will, but "interventions work" (IE, you can treat people like objects and change their behavior), but we don't know what the "wrong" foods are or how to ethically limit the consumption of unhealthy foods. Ultimately it seems like if scientifially we could determine a course of action that would reduce health care costs ethically while improving health, monetary incentives to reach compliance would be effecftive.

I have Bayes on the phone, he says "What percentage of teens in the American south are obese?"

21.2% in 12-19 range, according to the CDC, so certainly overrepresented.

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html

Note that obesity rates (significantly) throughout the country and a significant part of the south is in the "more obese" region ("above 40%" https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/prevalence-maps.html) so the national average can't be used to determine if the sample was overrepresented.

I get that there can be confounders on how you interpret it, but nothing about this statement seems improper or incorrect: "In America obesity is overrepresented in teenagers hospitalized with Covid-19."

if the study was done in a population that is elevated in obesity (for example in the south) then you wouldn't be able to generalize it to the national population.

While true that one can't say for sure, the link you provided gives a 95% CI that's still pretty close to 40%. I'd wager the chance of randomly picking 6 hospitals whose obesity rate way further than 4-5 sigma away the mean would be pretty damn small.

That's pretty close to 50%. Which makes me wonder, what percentage of teenagers have obesity? Maybe it's 61%?

Yes, perhaps all those scientists are idiots and you're the only smart person, even though you're too lazy to Google it before making a snarky comment.

Scientists just discover facts. Even small facts can be significant. How often have you seen "Obscure math theory that was widely accepted to be true finally proven"? The news media decides which facts are worth reporting on. I'm not disagreeing with this fact, but it's always good to remember that on a slow news day, the news media likes to overhype trivial facts.

Scientists usually discover probabilities, not facts. Mathematics is an essential tool for science, but most people don't consider it a science itself.

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