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Boris Johnson is planning a war on obesity after deciding that his own tactile battle against the coronavirus was exacerbated by being overweight.
The prime minister is ready to shake off longstanding opposition to ‘nanny state’ policies and launch an offensive against the nation’s bulging waists after the coronavirus is defeated.
He has told top advisers that the experience, which he famously said “could have been either way,” has left him determined to lead a public health campaign.
Boris Johnson is determined to put Britain on a bicycle, his colleagues say, as he declares war on fat after his brush with the coronavirus.
Being obese doubles the risk of needing hospital treatment for coronavirus, according to research.
And with one in three British adults now clinically obese, the UK has one of the highest rates in the world.
Boris Johnson appears in the photo while still suffering from the effects of the coronavirus.
According to The Times, Johnson told some of his colleagues that “it’s fine for you, thinness,” while speaking about the danger of being overweight for Covid patients.
His own weight was 17 and a half years before entering the hospital, indicating that his BMI is 36 when he takes into account his height of 5 feet 9 inches and places him above the BMI of 30, which means that a person is obese.
The Prime Minister is determined to use the coronavirus pandemic to make people healthier, and is said to be “obsessed” with getting people to bike to work.
His shift to interventionism follows long-standing opposition to “nanny state” measures and skepticism about the sugar tax, which he promised to review, among other “sin taxes.”
He disagreed with Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who firmly believes that the sugar tax, introduced in April 2018, has been a “ total win ”.
A major study conducted in Glasgow last week found that obesity can double the risk of needing hospitalization for COVID-19.
And research from the University of Oxford has found that people with morbid obesity are three times more likely to die of coronavirus.
The news came after official figures revealed that one in four coronavirus deaths in the UK had diabetes, a condition that is often linked to obesity.
For the first time, NHS England published a breakdown of deaths from pre-existing conditions. Only five percent of victims did not have an underlying problem.
Of the 22,332 patients who died since March 31, when pre-existing conditions began to be reported, some 5,873 (26%) had diabetes.
The Prime Minister has demanded that measures be taken on obesity (in the image, a file image of an obese man)
The condition, which affects around four million Britons, makes people more susceptible to developing infections.
High blood sugar levels can weaken the defense of the patient’s immune system, causing it to respond more slowly to viruses such as the coronavirus.
It is also closely related to obesity, which has been recognized as possible risk factors for serious complications with COVID-19.
Doctors said diabetics would have better COVID-19 results if they managed their condition properly.
The official government death count shows that 33,614 people have died from COVID-19 in the UK, including 24,100 in hospitals in England.
Diabetes is a common condition that affects one in 16 people in the UK. That includes both diagnosed and undiagnosed people.
Dr. Hajira Dambha-Miller, GP and diabetes specialist, said the data did not surprise her.
She told MailOnline: ‘People with diabetes are more susceptible to infections, even if we are not in the midst of a pandemic.
“Diabetes leads to increased susceptibility to infection because there is more sugar for insects to grow and chronic inflammation means that the immune system is slower to eliminate it.”
Dr. Dambha-Miller said that when someone has diabetes, their blood turns to “molasses” as a result of high sugar levels.
“Physically, it is more difficult for the immune system to get to the virus,” he said. ‘Bug viruses do a lot of damage before the immune system realizes it’s there.
‘When the body kicks in, it won’t work as it should. The immune cells are damaged because they have been saturated with sugar for years and are not working as they should. ”
Meanwhile, as the Government has promised to ease the UK shutdown, the Prime Minister is also said to be interested in focusing on moving to a recovery phase for the UK and delivering overt promises.
He highlighted promises such as the presentation of 20,000 more police officers and the construction of 40 hospitals.
“He was optimistic and focused on the future, on getting back on the leveling agenda,” a source told The Times.
Up to 220,000 people in England may have the coronavirus at this time, according to government figures, according to a study, 19 MILLION Britons could have had the virus without a diagnosis
By Sam Blanchard and Connor Boyd for MailOnline
As many as 222,000 people in England may be infected with the coronavirus at this time, according to a government test survey, while scientists estimate that a third of the population has already had it and has recovered.
The first round of randomized public tests has identified only 33 positive cases of COVID-19 from a sample of 10,705 people and estimated a national infection level of 0.27 percent, one in 370 people.
Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer for England, said at the Downing Street briefing that the data represented “a really low level of infection” in the community.
The Bureau of National Statistics estimates that somewhere between 94,000 and 222,000 people in England currently have the coronavirus, putting its average estimate at 148,000. This represents 0.27 percent of the population and means that approximately one in 370 people carries the virus.
England’s best statisticians estimate that 0.27 percent of the population has been infected with COVID-19 on any given day in the past two weeks, equivalent to around 148,000 people and certainly between 94,000 and 222,000.
This suggests that 148,000 people had the virus at any given time between April 27 and May 10, which is the average estimate between a minimum of 94,000 and a maximum of 222,000. During that time, 66,343 people were officially diagnosed.
And the infection rate is six times higher in healthcare workers and caregivers than in the general population, according to the survey. While 1.33 percent of people working in patient roles in hospitals or homes tested positive for the virus, only 0.22 percent of people with other jobs did.
The numbers announced today do not include anyone who has been tested in a nursing home or hospital, where statisticians said “COVID-19 infection rates are likely to be higher.”
The majority of official tests, which have detected a total of 233,151 positive cases throughout the outbreak, are carried out in hospitals and residences. But researchers at the University of Manchester have said this is likely a huge understatement of the number of people who have already had the disease.
Those scientists, who studied the infection rate in local areas, predicted that 29 percent of everyone in Britain, more than 19 million people, had already contracted the infection on April 19, when 73,000 people were diagnosed.
However, a leading scientist cast doubt on the accuracy of this because data from other countries show much lower levels of infection; For example, a study in Spain found evidence that only five percent of people are infected and even in New York, which was worse than the UK, there is no evidence that more than a quarter have contracted the disease.
Britain’s own chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said last week that he believed that around four per cent of people in the United Kingdom had so far been exposed, increasing to a 10 per cent exposure in London.
The ONS data is soon expected to release antibody data showing how many people have already had the infection, but they currently don’t have enough data for a reliable estimate.
The current survey, of which this is the first data set, will continue as part of the government’s ‘test, track and trace’ plan to get out of the lockdown and will be expanded to regular tests in more than 10,000 homes.
Its first findings come when the Health Department announced 428 more coronavirus deaths across the UK today, bringing the total number of deaths to 33,614. The actual number is believed to exceed 50,000.
The ONS data showed that people’s age did not appear to influence the likelihood of being diagnosed with the virus.
It found that about 0.32 percent of people ages 2 to 19, or 50-69, were infected with the virus, along with 0.26 percent of people ages 20 to 49 and 0.23 percent of those over 70. years.
Government officials say that each infected person will transmit the virus to between 0.5 and 0.9 other people, showing that their reproduction rate, R, is less than one, so the outbreak is shrinking.
Research from the University of Cambridge and Public Health England suggests that spread rates vary across the country, decreasing to 0.4 in London and accelerating to around 0.8 in the northeast. As long as it can be kept below one and the number of cases is low, it should be safe to start facilitating blocking.
The 33 people who tested positive on the ONS came from 30 different households, suggesting they lived alone or most had failed to infect the people they lived with. It is not known if they realized they were sick before taking the test.
The same 5,276 households will be evaluated regularly to see how the numbers change, and the scheme will be expanded to 10,000 households where everyone over the age of two will be asked to participate in swab testing.
If everyone in the country could get tested, it could be expected that between one in 250 and one in 588 people test positive. It is impossible to be sure because the sample size is small.
“Our latest estimates indicate,” said the ONS report, “that at one point during the two weeks from April 27 to May 10, 2020, an average of 148,000 people in England had the coronavirus (COVID-19). ”
He added: ‘All estimates are subject to uncertainty, since a sample is only a representation of a subset of the general population. However, the confidence intervals provide us with a range of values that we believe contain the unknown true number of cases that test positive for COVID-19 infection.
‘While we estimate that 148,000 people in England would test positive, if we repeat this study many times, 95 percent of the time the true number of positives would be between 94,000 and 222,000. This equates to between 0.17% and 0.41% of the target population. ”
