According to a new study published on August 27th, obesity in the young surged following the shelter in place policies that were instituted by every state government in the United States.
Researchers are already aware that the lockdowns, as well as lingering fear of the coronavirus, caused a host of issues in adults including a surge in obesity, but little was known about BMI changes among the young.
Researchers compared the body mass index of children aged 5 to 17 years during the pandemic in 2020 to the same period before the pandemic in 2019.
“Overweight or obesity increased among 5- through 11-year-olds from 36.2% to 45.7% during the pandemic, an absolute increase of 8.7% and relative increase of 23.8% compared with the reference period (Table). The absolute increase in overweight or obesity was 5.2% among 12- through 15-year-olds (relative increase, 13.4%) and 3.1% (relative increase, 8.3%) among 16- through 17-year-olds. Most of the increase among youths aged 5 through 11 years and 12 through 15 years was due to an increase in obesity.”
A recent study from the University of California and Rand found that the lockdowns didn’t save lives, and may have actually resulted in more deaths than if no lockdowns happened at all.
“We failed to find that countries or U.S. states that implemented shelter-in-place policies earlier, and in which shelter-in-place policies had longer to operate, had lower excess deaths than countries-and U.S. states that were slower to implement shelter-in-place policies. We also failed to observe differences in excess death trends before and after the implementation of [shelter-in-place] policies based on pre-shelter-in-place COVID-19 death rates.”
According to other data, there has been a steep rise in child suicide and suicidal ideation.
“We’ve seen an upsurge in really bad suicide attempts,” and the pandemic is likely behind that increase, said Dr. Taranjeet Jolly, an adult and pediatric psychiatrist at Penn State Health’s Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.
In just one Las Vegas school district, over a dozen students committed suicide, causing the district to reopen schools early.
For all age groups, the lockdowns and other restrictions put in place by state governments across the country, seem to have caused massive negative consequences, many of which are entirely irreversible.
The rate of hospitalization for children aged 5-17 stands at approximately 6 per 100,000 for COVID-19, whereas the estimated rate of hospitalization for influenza is much higher in the same age group.
Additionally, according to a study out of Stanford University, COVID-19 hospitalizations among children are immensely over-counted.
Furthermore, a team of Johns Hopkins researchers recently reported that after studying a large sample size of children, they found zero COVID deaths among healthy kids.
Dr. Marty Makary, a medical expert and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, analyzed approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with Covid from April to August 2020. Makary and his team “found a mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia.”
