Virtually all the people who died of covid were fat[1]. If the military forced everyone to exercise (and diet, but that's harder to mandate than exercising) it would have been much more effective than forcing everyone to wear masks. (Masks are still good though.) Most of us are going to get covid even if we stay inside all day (I got it twice) so this should be a wake-up call to be prepared to survive it. Or don't, stay overweight and choke on your own blood if you want--that's "freedom".
In the cited article, the only statistic I see on weight specifically is that 74% of critically ill UK patients were overweight or obese, which makes it a risk factor but not the be all and end all, given what fraction of the whole pop fits that category (~65%).
It also says that 99% of deaths in Italy were from patients with pre-existing conditions, which would included weight related and non-weight related ones.
Regardless of COVID, maintaining a healthy weight is probably one of more important lifestyle changes one can make to reduce risk of overall mortality.
The summary statistic leaves out the effect of age. Most of the non-overweight people who died were old. The main reason you'd die of covid if you are young is being overweight or obese:
> Patients with BMIs greater than 40 kg/m2 had higher death rates overall, and those with BMIs greater than 45 kg/m2 had a risk ratio of 4.18. Most strikingly, however, those younger than 60 years had increased risk ratios of 12 to 17 versus 1 to 3 if they were older; high BMI increased risk in men more than in women.
> Virtually all the people who died of covid were fat[1].
Your source doesn't support that. Viewing each of the separate country-specific statistics as being generally applicable you could conclude:
* A majority were obese, but a significant minority were not.
* Virtually all had some preexisting condition that COVID aggravated, and some (but not all) of those were preexisting conditions for which obesity is a risk factor.
> If the military forced everyone to exercise (and diet, but that's harder to mandate than exercising) it would have been much more effective than forcing everyone to wear masks.
That's not at all supported by any evidence which you've presented. For one thing you seem to have not considered in dreaming this up, people (especially, but not exclusively, of advanced age) with the kind of preexisting conditions involved often can't just pick up an exercise routine even if doing so before developing the conditions could have prevented them.
> Most of us are going to get covid even if we stay inside all day (I got it twice)
While there is some concern about whether getting it gives you long-term immunity, AFAICT there is no confirmed reinfection and most indicated potential reinfections are more likely to involve at least one testing error rather than an actual reinfection.
> Virtually all the people who died of covid were fat
This is true, but mostly because virtually all people are overweight or obese. At least, the link you provided cited that 74% of critically ill Covid patients in the UK were obese, while it turns out that 64% of the UK is already in the overweight/obese category anyway.
Masks are still probably a more effective way to prevent critical illness from covid than exercise.
We don't wear masks for the cold and flu season because the threshold of dying from them is very high. In an ideal world where everyone were fit with strong immune systems, the threshold of dying from covid would be more similar to that of the flu--you wouldn't need to wear a mask for the same reason you wouldn't need to wear one for the cold and flu season.
(That said I'm not against masks. We should have been wearing them for cold and flu seasons this whole time.)
It's causation, not just correlation. If you want an explanation, here's what physicians say:
> Then, there is Newton's second law: force = mass × acceleration. It requires more muscle force to displace the diaphragm downward when a substantial fat mass lies below it. Abdominal obesity also makes it more difficult to breathe in a prone position that is favored to improve ventilation in patients with COVID-19. Among more specific mechanisms is expression of angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 protein in adipose tissue. This is the docking protein for SARS-CoV-2 to enter a cell, and fat has higher levels than the lungs and so may serve as a viral refuge and replication site, prolonging virus shedding.
I'm not saying that there isn't a causal mechanism. I'm saying that you can't infer anything at all about the effect size from the proportion of people who die who are obese.
[1] https://www.worldobesity.org/news/obesity-and-covid-19-polic...