How does obesity factor into the severity of Covid-19?

From the very start I've viewed social distancing and so called lockdown measures as being almost entirely useless.  Empahisis on the word almost because I do think there is some minimal benefit, but nothing that is worth the costs that Canadians have had to pay, and continue to pay.  

I use the term "so called" when describing lockdown measures because nobody has ever been truly locked down.  People are still going to work, to pharmacies, bank atms, grocery stores, and much more.  We've simply been encouraged to limit our travels to that which is essential and to avoid contact with people outside of our immediate households as much as possible, with some places now liberalizing the rules somewhat.  

This is why I've always thought that these measures aren't going to do much to stop viral spread.  Think of Amazon fulfillment centres, food distribution warehouses, meat processing plants...and many more.  Basically you have veritable armies of workers going in and out of their places of employment 24/7.  They're also buying gas, riding transit, shopping in grocery and pharmacies, keying in their pin numbers on keypads.  No way the virus is going to stop spreading with all the activity going on, even at reduced levels there's still too many vectors for this virus to spread.

And yet we look at the results of countries and we see some getting slammed hard, others very lightly and every point in between.  Pretty much every developed western country has brought in social distancing and lockdown style measures except for Sweden.  So the assumption by many is that the countries that did well had citizens who were more diligent in following the advice of government and health officials. 

But that could be completely wrong.  

Looking at Belgium and Sweden, the country that had stricter lockdown measures, Belgium, has fared much worse than Sweden where schools, bars and restaraunts were allowed to stay open.  Why???  Did the Belgians totally disregard the orders of their experts?  That strains credulity I'm afraid.  

Maybe social distancing and all the other measures aren't the answer.  Perhaps there's a better and more logical explanation for why Sweden's death toll has been significantly lower than Belgium's.  To give you the magintude of the difference, Beligium has almost 9,700 deaths due to Covid as I am writing this, with a population of almost 11.6 million. That's 837 deaths per million Belgians.  Sweden by contrast has just 5,053 Covid deaths and their population is about 10,1 million.  That's 500 deaths per million Swedes.  

So Belgium's deaths per million is 67% higher than Sweden's.  WHY???

Perhaps Swedes are simply healthier than Belgians?  There's a growing body of evidence that is showing obesity is a major risk factor when it comes Covid being fatal.  The Guardian recently did a story with this title:  

Obesity is a major risk factor for dying of Covid-19. We need to take it more seriously.  

Does Belgium have a higher incidence of obesity than Sweden?  It turns out they do.  Belgium reportedly has 22.1% of its population listed as being obese, in Sweden the number is 20.6%.  It's not a huge difference, but it's not insignificant either.  In a country of 10,000,000 people each percentage point equals, 100,000 people.  So Belgium has over 200,000 more people that could be considered vulneralble based on this emerging scientific research.  

I'm not saying that obesity is the smoking gun, research shows that there are a number of variables that impact how severe Covid is.  But it does make sense that obseity would be a significant contributing factor because of the strain all that extra weight puts on a person's organs, especially the heart.  Being obese increases the risk of diabetes and kidney disease, and a host of other conditions.

In Canada we've seen what the biggest risk is, being old and sick.  When the novel coronavirus breaks out in a Long Term Care facility the deaths pile up.  LTCs as everyone knows are the final stop for those who are elderly, sick and dying.  Take away this demographic group and this would not be considered the emergency that it's being billed as.

This blog is a bit of a one string banjo, and the note I keep playing over and over is that lockdown measures are doing more harm than good.  The cure is exponentially worse than the disease.  We know a lot about who is at risk from covid now, and rather than destroying millions of lives by trying to keep everyone from getting infected we need to focus our limited and dwindling resources on protecting those for whom it's serious and let those who are younger and healthy get back to rebuilding their lives, sadly for some it's already too late.