“It’s been a long time since I’ve had those up and down looks. Before, it was out of the corner of my eye, without insistence. Today the look is no longer the same. ” Behind the masks, Paul (name has been changed), 46, felt a change in attitude.
Strictly obese, this civil servant, residing in Seine-Saint-Denis, has been subject to strict health discipline for a year: teleworking, outings limited to races once a week, rigorous respect of barrier gestures … Also, when he allows himself to ask the customer of a supermarket to put his mask back on his nose and that this one measures him, Paul is now looking up. “There was a time when we were all in the same basket when it came to the virus. Today, the collective begins to crack, we are made to understand that we are bothering, we consider that it is our fault if the hospitals are full. “” We “, these are people suffering from obesity.
Because these are indeed two epidemics that overlap and collide. One, recent, the Covid-19, which in fifteen months has affected more than 130 million people worldwide and resulted in the death of 2.8 million of them. The other, older, obesity, which affects 13% of the world population, but which has tripled in forty years and is taking alarming proportions in many countries.
Obesity is not a communicable disease, of course, but the World Health Organization (WHO) does not hesitate to call it an epidemic, given its rapid spread, and the number of deaths it has caused. results in each year: 2.8 million.
In the spring of 2020, as the world stunned the virulence of SARS-CoV-2, obesity – commonly defined when the body mass index (BMI), weight divided by height squared, is over 30 – quickly emerged as a risk factor for developing severe forms of Covid-19. Very early on, resuscitators noted that nearly one in two patients in their departments suffered from it, and Emmanuel Macron mentioned obesity, alongside diabetes and cancer, in his first address to the French on the health crisis. March 12. However, care has not followed, and a year later, the predominant feeling is that of a population singled out, without having been sufficiently protected and in particular vaccinated.
“A textbook case of French health policy”
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