SIMPLE SOLUTION

There are plenty of health-based reasons not to gain too much weight, and in 2020, we have encountered yet another compelling one. As world leaders Donald Trump and Boris Johnson now recognise, obesity increases your risk of dying from Covid-19.

Obesity causes the body to generate chronic inflammation, weakening our immune response. It’s also associated with a higher likelihood of diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and lung disease – all of which makes it a risk factor for severe Covid-19 cases.

A US study commissioned by the World Bank showed that obese sufferers of Covid-19 were 74% more likely to end up in intensive care and 48% more likely to die. Almost a third of deaths from the virus in the UK were among people with diabetes, according to one early study, and the older that people were, the higher the risk.

And that hoped-for vaccine, if it happens, is expected to have less benefit for obese people than for others – at least, that’s what experts predict based on what they know from tests of the Sars and flu vaccines.

For US President Trump, his age (74) and sex were other risk factors increasing his susceptibility to Covid-19, but his body mass index of 33.3 puts him at the lower end of the obesity spectrum.

His British counterpart, Boris Johnson, aged 56, acknowledges that he was “way overweight” when he was hospitalised with the virus in April and has launched a campaign to reduce