Personal Risk

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Anchor lead: When you consider personal choices in the pandemic, what should you consider? Elizabeth Tracey reports

If you’re older you’ve probably already heeded warnings about avoiding Sars-CoV2. Same if you have high blood pressure or heart disease. Now, even if you’re younger but obese, you may want to consider your risk from COVID-19. That’s according to research by David Kass, a cardiologist at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues from around the country, published in the Lancet.

Kass: There was a general sense, if you’re younger you’re probably OK. What our findings suggest is that’s probably not really the case. There are aspects independent of just the weight pressing on the lung that go with obesity that I think make you at somewhat higher risk: diabetes, hypertension, these are all risk factors for a virus that increasingly we’re finding is probably attacking blood vessels as one of its main actions.  :28

Kass says that if you are obese, exercising caution as states reopen, keeping physical distance between you and others, and employing public health recommendations is prudent. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.