According to researchers from The University of Texas at San Antonio and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Covid-19 pandemic has been more fatal for adult populations residing in parts of the world characterised by excess body weight.

“This association holds across countries belonging to different income groups and is not sensitive to a population’s median age, proportion of the elderly, and/or proportion of females,” said lead principal investigator Hamid Beladi from UTSA.

To explain, the team analysed plausible associations of Covid-19 mortality and excess weight in nearly 5.5 billion adults from 154 countries around the world. To identify potential patterns in data, the researchers employed cutting-edge techniques of statistical analyses.

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Beladi said that when the proportion of the overweight people in a country’s adult population is one percentage point higher than the proportion of the overweight in a second country’s adult population, it is reasonable to predict that Covid-19 mortality would be 3.5 percentage points higher in the first country than it would be in the second.

“The average individual is less likely to die from Covid-19 in a country with a relatively low proportion of the overweight in the adult population, all other things being equal, than she or he would be in a country with a relatively high proportion of the overweight in the adult population,” Beladi said.