Obesity eyed as Covid risk factor
Obesity eyed as Covid risk factor
Plus: New Huntersville Firebirds stymied in bottle display; Update coming on Crescent's big River District project (and renderings!); 2 land sales on 7th St./Monroe Road; Married amid bunny art
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9 of 10 pediatric Covid patients in ICU are obese, Novant says, but N.C. health officials have been quiet about risks; ‘underlying conditions’ lingo preferred
by Steve Harrison and Claire Donnelly, WFAE
The children with Covid-19 in Dr. Eugene Daugherty’s pediatric intensive care unit often have one thing in common: obesity.
“At least 9 out of 10 patients that we’re seeing who are sick enough especially to be in the ICUs throughout the state, obesity plays a part in this,” said Daugherty, who is with Novant Health’s Children’s Hospital in Charlotte.
Since the start of the pandemic, there have been numerous studies worldwide showing the heightened dangers that Covid-19 poses to people who are overweight. The World Obesity Federation, for instance, has shown that death rates from Covid-19 have been 10 times higher in countries where more than half of the population is overweight.
But some doctors and health experts are questioning whether public health officials have done enough to convey that message, especially to younger people.
“It feels like — at least in the messaging that I’ve seen — as though it’s being treated as more of a footnote than anything else and something I feel like a lot of people have missed,” said Dr. Daniel Donner, a physician at Novant’s Pediatric SouthPark Clinic.
Donner says it’s particularly important because the number of obese children he’s seeing is increasing, with roughly 1 in 5 children 6 and older that come to his practice having obesity. He believes it’s due to stay-at-home orders that closed schools and kept children indoors.
A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that the rate of increase in body mass index in a group of roughly 432,000 children doubled during the pandemic compared to a pre-pandemic period, possibly because of the impact of stay-at-home orders and school closures.
The rate of obesity among the general population is also rising.
“Obesity has been fascinatingly ignored in this pandemic,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine at the University of San Francisco.
With nearly 90% of North Carolinians 65 and over fully vaccinated, Covid deaths among the elderly have declined.
And that’s shifted the disease’s toll to a younger population, who often have underlying health conditions. That’s often obesity, according to a WFAE review of death reports from the Mecklenburg County health department.
Silence on obesity for six months
In North Carolina, Health and Human Services Secretary Mandy Cohen is the state’s top messenger about Covid-19. She often appears with Gov. Roy Cooper during bimonthly or even weekly news conferences about the disease.
Cohen has talked often about the greater risk that Covid poses to elderly people. And she has discussed disparities in vaccination rates among racial and ethnic groups.
But a review of her media briefings with Cooper shows she last mentioned the word “obesity” in mid-March, when she was listing underlying health conditions that allowed people to get vaccinated early. In those briefings, she has not made a special point to encourage people who are overweight to get vaccinated.
She has instead taken a blanket approach, urging everyone to get a shot.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website lists obesity as one of 17 risk factors for Covid-19. It ranks them in alphabetical order — not by the danger posed by each.
“It could be there’s an element of ‘Well, let’s not blame the victim,’” Gandhi said. “With obesity, it seemed like it was simply not discussed. And it’s so important.”
What Mecklenburg County death reports show
To try to determine the role obesity plays in deaths from the disease, WFAE requested six months of data on Covid-19 deaths in Mecklenburg County.
It’s often difficult to determine an exact underlying condition since many are connected, like being a smoker and lung cancer. And the records are dependent on the notes of physicians at the hospital and could vary depending on who filled them out.
But the data shows:
There were 136 Covid deaths among people ages 65 and younger during that time in which an underlying cause of death was listed.
Of those deaths, 76 had either obesity or diabetes listed as an underlying risk factor.
Asthma was listed as an underlying cause in only five deaths among people 65 and younger. In one of those cases, the person was also described as morbidly obese.
Tobacco use was listed as an underlying cause in five deaths.
Cancer was listed as a risk factor in six deaths.
Being immunocompromised was a risk factor in two deaths.
The data also shows that among younger people, obesity is more often cited as a risk factor in a Covid death than among the elderly.
Among people older than 65, obesity was listed as a risk factor in 9% of the Covid deaths. For people younger than 65, it was a risk factor in 34% of Covid deaths.
Earlier this month, Mecklenburg Health Director Gibbie Harris spoke at a meeting of county commissioners and discussed the profile of recent Covid deaths.
“And many of those (deaths) — 95% — were among people with underlying chronic conditions,” Harris said. “So we know how important the vaccines are especially for those with underlying chronic conditions. And the one thing I want to emphasize is that we have children that fit into that category that have underlying chronic conditions.”
She did not mention any chronic underlying health condition by name.
Mecklenburg County Medical Director Meg Sullivan said the health department might have done more to make sure people understand different risk factors for Covid.
“The honest answer is I’m not sure if there has been that specific messaging to the extent that it needs to be,” Sullivan said.
Scott Gottlieb, who was Food and Drug Administrator from 2017 to 2019, said that public health officials could be more specific.
“It’s a fair point,” Gottlieb said, “because this is the challenge with public health messaging. So it’s true that a lot of the dialogue is around risk factors broadly, and they haven’t been clearly enumerated.”
With boosters now being available, Gottlieb said it’s important that people speak with their physicians about whether they are at high risk.
“When public health officials go out and speak about Covid, they speak about risk factors generally because it’s difficult to enumerate all of them,” he said. “And a lot of them are nuanced. If you are diabetic and obese you are at higher risk than someone who is just obese or just diabetic.”
Steve Harrison and Claire Donnelly are reporters with WFAE, Charlotte’s NPR news source, which originally published this article. It is republished with permission.
Today’s supporting sponsors are Landon A. Dunn, attorney-at-law in Matthews …
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Regulation puzzle: How can Huntersville’s new Firebirds have a lighted liquor display with no liquor?
The inability to acquire liquor is hitting a lot of local restaurants, but a new restaurant in Huntersville is feeling the effects in a different way.
Firebirds Wood Fired Grill, which plans to open a location in Birkdale Village in the coming weeks, wants to build a lighted bottle display. But it can’t buy enough bottles for the display, and it can’t get permission to use empty bottles, either, under North Carolina’s alcohol laws.
The restaurant’s state representative, Republican John Bradford, shared the following story at a hearing last week on the state’s liquor shortage, and sought a reply from ABC officials:
[I’d like] your thoughts on a trickle-down, real-life scenario that’s going on right now in my district. I have a restaurant called Firebirds. They’re a large restaurant, and they’re opening a location in District 98, which is what I represent in north Mecklenburg. They use liquor in multiple shelves. They have lights underneath, in what they call a “waterfall presentation” — they’ll put 280 bottles of liquor that will sit there, unopened, in perpetuity just to show off these beautiful caramel colors with light underneath. …
They’re getting ready to open up here in November, and they cannot get product to put on these shelves. …
So what they suggested was that they use empty bottles that they have from other locations and fill them up with colored water to put up on the shelves for display. And when they ran that by, I guess, Alcohol Law Enforcement, they said, “No, that’s a reasonable solution, but you cannot do that.” And it was because of the tax stamps.
So then they suggest, “Well, what if we brought all these empty bottles to the liquor store, stuck them there and … then purchased them back” — empty bottles, mind you — just so they could pay the tax? So they could then fill it with caramel-color water to get the color variation they would like, because the products are not available? And they were told, “Well, that seems very reasonable, but we can’t do that.” It was advised that the council for ABC said that that’s “no.”
So the last thing they suggested was, “Well, what if we just go to the distillers and buy empty bottles that have never had an ounce of liquid in it that have been sealed by the distillery just for decor?” … And they were told, “No, you can’t do that, because it doesn’t have liquor in it.” …
How can the commission help this one example of a small business owner … make sure they can put some bottles on these shelves before their grand opening so they don’t have 12 empty shelves? I would love to hear your take on if what they have suggested seems reasonable.
Deputy ABC Commissioner Terrance Merriweather replied that “we’re a regulatory agency, and we’re bound by the rules and regulations as well as the statute.” He said the ABC Commission would be happy to look into the matter.
And the ABC Commission’s assistant general counsel, Renee Metz, added that used liquor bottles can’t be part of a display because of a law requiring those bottles to be recycled. And empty bottles straight from a distillery could be problematic because law enforcement might believe that they once contained alcohol: “You cannot possess a spiritous liquor bottle without a tax stamp to prove that you paid the tax,” she said.
Bradford said the replies sounded like a “circle of no” and that “we may need to put our creative hat on.” —TM
Update coming on Crescent’s big River District — and new renderings
Tonight’s City Council agenda calls for an update on The River District, the Crescent Communities project envisioned as a huge 1,400-acre mixed-use development along the Catawba River.
It’s been in the works for more than five years, and Crescent said earlier this year that it expected construction to start this year. The scope is huge — a rezoning in 2016 allows up to 8 million s.f. of office, 500,000 s.f. of retail, 1,000 hotel rooms, 2,300 single-family homes and 2,550 apartments, the Business Journal reported in January. It would be built over a decade or so.
The city has annexed some of the land, and infrastructure is in the works. And Crescent has been mostly quiet about it. The Ledger asked for an update in August, and the company at the time said it had nothing to share.
Crescent describes it as a “1,400-acre master-planned community that embraces its natural resources and features dramatic topography, preserved tree canopies and open space as principle organizing elements.”
Rendering alert 🚨: We did notice, though, that there are what appear to be some new River District renderings on Crescent’s website … and we know how people eat up new renderings, so here you go:
They seem to show an urban-style garden, cobblestone-looking streets, lots of open space, parks and commercial properties coexisting with residential buildings.
Sounds like more info to come this week. —TM
Registration open for Ledger online event: ‘College admissions: What you need to know right now!’
This Thursday (Oct. 7), at 7 p.m., we’re holding an online event exclusively for Ledger members. It’s focused on helping parents navigate the college admissions process in a way that preserves your sanity and your relationship with your teenager.
We’re holding it in partnership with our friends at Jumbo, a Charlotte company that builds live-streaming platforms.
➡️ Here are more details, and a registration link that is accessible to members.
Our panelists are:
Maggie Murphy, Admissions Counselor, Furman University
Jack Whelan, Director of College Guidance, Providence Day School
Anna Davis, Owner, College Guidance, LLC
Lindsay Goff, Consultant, Scholarship Gold Consulting
They’ll cover topics from timelines to college visits to scholarships and more. The Ledger’s own Cristina Bolling will moderate. We hope to see you there!
In brief:
Incarceration rates fall: Mecklenburg County’s incarceration rate fell by more than half between 2000 and 2020, according to Census figures. In 2000, 310 people per 100,000 population in the county were in correctional facilities, and that fell to 142 per 100,000 last year. (Primer North Carolina)
Covid numbers keep falling: Mecklenburg Covid hospitalizations declined for the fourth straight week and other key figures fell, including average daily cases and percentage positive. (Mecklenburg County Health Department)
Vaccine required at American: American Airlines says its employees must be vaccinated under new federal guidelines for government contractors. “It is clear that team members who choose to remain unvaccinated will not be able to work at American Airlines,” company executives wrote in a letter to employees on Friday. Charlotte is American’s second-largest hub. (Dallas Morning News)
Discouraging investor landlords: Some homeowners associations in Charlotte are changing their rules to discourage investors from buying and renting out properties. Some are establishing requirements that owners live in the houses for a year or two before making them available for rent. (Observer, subscriber-only)
New plans for chemical HQ: Clariant Corp. sold its longtime North American headquarters on the corner of Monroe and Wendover roads to a company affiliated with Atlanta-based Parkside Partners. The 9.8-acre site sold for $8.35M, property records show. Parkside “plans to convert the 1950s-era building in east Charlotte into a mixed-use creative office space,” the Business Journal reported.
Elizabeth land sale: Two lots on 7th Street at Ridgeway Avenue in Elizabeth, totaling 1.3 acres, sold for $4.45M to a company called Three Points Realty, according to property records.
Gaston County legislator: N.C. Rep. Dana Bumgardner, a Republican from Gaston County, died Saturday from cancer. He was 67 and in the middle of his fifth term. (Gaston Gazette)
Kannapolis gets social: The Kannapolis City Council has designed an area in its downtown as the first “social district” in the Charlotte area, where open containers of alcohol are permitted to be carried outside under a new state law. The zone is known as the “West Avenue District” and is adjacent to Atrium Health Ballpark, home of the Kannapolis Cannonballers. (Queen City Nerve)
Married … with bunnies: A couple got married last week at the giant inflatable bunnies public art exhibit at First Ward Park. “I really wanted the space we got married in to feel as magical as our relationship feels,” Elizabeth Palmisano said. (WFAE)
Taking stock
Unless you are a day trader, checking your stocks daily is unhealthy. So how about weekly? How local stocks of note fared last week (through Friday’s close), and year to date:
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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Contributing editor: Tim Whitmire, CXN Advisory