LONDON – Do you want to beat COVID-19? Then lose weight.
That’s the message from Boris Johnson, Britain’s boisterous prime minister, who has used his own brush with the coronavirus to urge the British to lose a few pounds to reduce the risk of contracting it.
Johnson released a video Monday saying he had lost 14 pounds since he was admitted to an intensive care unit at a London hospital in April.
“I have always wanted to lose weight for centuries and years, and I think a lot of people I struggle with my weight go up and down, but ever since I recovered from the coronavirus I have been constantly rebuilding my fitness.” he said.
“But when I entered the ICU, when I was really sick, I was very, very overweight. I’m only around 5 foot 10, you know, on the outside and, you know, I was too fat.”
Also on Monday, the British government announced a series of measures to combat fat, including banning television commercials for high-fat, sugar, and salt foods before 9 p.m. Policies marked a change for Johnson, a Libertarian conservative who just a year ago was ranting against the “taxes on sin” in fast food as an example of the “nanny state.”
In 2006, Johnson offered his support to a group of mothers who made headlines for pushing fast food through the bars of a school where unhealthy snacks were banned. “I say that people eat what they want. Why shouldn’t they push cakes across railings? she said at the time.
Weight is a long-standing concern in the United Kingdom, where 27.8 percent of people are obese, according to 2018 World Health Organization figures. Only Turkey, at 32.1 percent, and Malta, at 28.9 percent, scored higher in that study.
Several scientific studies and national health organizations have linked obesity with an increased risk of becoming seriously ill from COVID-19. In the UK, almost 8 percent of critically ill patients with COVID-19 in intensive care units were morbidly obese, compared to 2.9 percent of the general population, according to UK government statistics.
Johnson said he lost weight through a daily race with his dog, Dilyn. And in addition to reducing the risk of COVID-19, there’s another reason you’re encouraging people to stay active: Obesity is costing the National Health Service billions of pounds.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock wrote in an op-ed in The Telegraph on Monday that if every overweight Briton lost just £ 5, it would save the NHS £ 100m in the next five years.
Johnson’s time in the hospital came to symbolize how COVID-19 overwhelmed the UK in April and May. Its 45,000 deaths to date are the third highest in the world, and the Johnson government’s response has been heavily criticized by public health experts and opposition politicians.
Johnson admitted that his team had underestimated how viral the coronavirus is, in a BBC interview on Friday. “We did not understand [the virus] the way we would have liked in the first weeks and months, “he said.
