The crucial variable with Covid-19 isn’t ethnicity – it’s fat

In the UK’s capital city, where do the fewest obese people live? North London. The most? East London. The weight disparity between largely white and largely immigrant residents might seem to concern race, but I will argue — against the tide, as right now everything is about race — that, deep down, the fat differential isn’t ethnic.

The American and British media have chided for months about higher Covid fatality rates among minorities, and I’ve previously cast medical dubiety on the fashionable claim that these patients are dying of racism. Released last month, a statistically meticulous Columbia University study of some 7,000 cases validates my scepticism. As the New York Times reported: ‘The study did not find race or ethnicity to be an independent risk factor. The researchers did find extreme obesity to be a strong independent risk factor for worse outcomes.’ Indeed, when isolated from conditions like diabetes that corpulence can trigger, obesity alone raises the likelihood of a dire Covid response by fostering inflammation and breathing difficulties.

The crucial variable isn’t race. It’s fat. Patients with ‘extreme obesity’ — a BMI of 40 or more — were almost three times more likely to die from Covid than people of normal weight. Those with a BMI of 45 or more were four times more likely to die. And poundage is as perilous for young people as for the over-60s.

The cross-Atlantic correlation between weight and ethnicity is awkward. A staggering 42 per cent of all Americans are obese (9 per cent extremely so) — the same figure as for the white majority. The prevalence of obesity among blacks is nearly 50 per cent; among Hispanics, 45 per cent; among (mostly East) Asians, only 17 per cent.

After three hours of digging online, I can only conclude that the British breakdown of adult obesity by race is a closely held state secret.