As a reporter of times of india. write a report on vaccination against covid-19
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The exclusion of obesity — a BMI of 30 and above — from the list of comorbidities that entitle a person to avail of Covid-19 vaccine has generated a debate over what appears to be a deliberate oversight. Medical experts have termed it a “glaring exception”, with Dr Mufazzal Lakdawala of Mumbai, saying that “obese patients had a 60% higher chance of complications and 30% higher risk of dying from the infection”.
Lakdawala said that 80% of diabetic patients are also obese — diabetes is among the list of comorbidities that entitles a person suffering from it to get the jab. A doctor at the city’s BYL Nair Hospital disclosed that 35% of their patients were obese, which leads to their lungs being “compressed and putting them on a ventilator” posed “an additional challenge”.
While being obese can up the risk of a person having other diseases that on their own increase risk of fatality from Covid-19, having excess fat, especially in the abdomen region, causes the diaphragm to push up, causing the muscle that lies below the chest cavity to push against the lungs and constrict them, leading to a restricted airflow as lung volume is reduced. That in turn leads to collapse of airways in the lower lobes of the lungs, where more blood oxygenation takes place than in the upper lobes.
In a study published last year in Obesity Reviews, an international team of researchers that combined data from a study of 399,000 patients, obese people who got infected with SARS-Cov-2 had a 113% more likelihood than normal weight people to be hospitalised, 74% more likely to be admitted into the ICU and 48% more likely to die from Covid-19.
In addition, obesity also causes an increase in blood clotting and considering the nature of the novel coronavirus, medical experts say the risk of blood clotting goes up in Covid-19 obese people. Additionally, obese people also have lower immunity partly due to fat cells infiltrating the organs where immune cells are made in the body, such as the spleen, bone marrow and thymus, according to Catherine Andersen, a nutritional scientist at Fairfield University — with the problem not only being fewer immune cells, but also less potent ones.