Obesity is the main underlying condition. 37-40% of Americans over the age of 20 are obese. A lot of them seem not to know this, as they are definitely as likely to go out, from what I can tell, as anyone else.
8% of adult Americans have asthma - which means about 8% of the obese have two pre-existing conditions, and brings the total number of Americans with pre-existing conditions to about 50%.
After that, it gets hard to calculate, as many diabetics are also overweight or obese.
UK has similar obesity rates and that 9 out of 10 that had an underlying health condition - well, in UK and US, again, obesity is the most common of them, followed by diabetes. So I'm going to theorize that the diabetes deaths are in diabetics who are not obese (in terms of how the underlying condition was classified - again, many people have more than one underlying condition; most people reading this probably have at least one - I have 4). Both of my thirty-something daughters have 1 condition each.
In fact, I'd wager that the majority of Americans have at least 1 underlying condition. 10.5% are diabetic (I'm guessing only half of those are obese), so add another 5%.
50% of Americans have some form of heart disease. It's our leading cause of death. Naturally, a disproportionate number of them are obese, but not all of them are. So add another 10% (my guess).
Add all of that up and we have about 70% of us with underlying conditions (we haven't even mentioned many others that would be considered underlying in this situation: COPD, cancer, anorexia, alcoholism, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, MS, CF, RA, blood clotting disorders, celiac disease, Crohn's disease, etc etc). Among my students (average age is probably 23-24) about half report they have allergies. All of those would count as "pre-existing conditions" for the purposes of mortality research. In fact, it's really important to know this, because many students take some kind of steroid (usually a nasal spray) that needs to be studied in relationship to this virus.
So...do you think that most people will think of themselves as being in this vulnerable group? It's true that the surfers I'm watching on webcam are not obese (there's just one guy out of about 50 this morning that I've seen), but on the beach at Huntington Beach, I'd say about 20% are obese. When Vegas reopens, it'll be about 50% obese people out there, is my guess (along with tons of people with other underlying conditions, as the crowd contains may people over the age of 40, for good reasons).
California has lower obesity rates than half of the rest of the nation. The South has the highest. Colorado and Hawaii have the least amount. There are zero US states that have fewer than 20% who are obese.
I don't think the obese people are going to stay home, personally. At least, a lot of them won't. I'm seeing a pic on my TV right now, of a boat in Laguna and there are about 30 people on one point, I can see that 3 of them are well into obese, of 10 people visible as the boat goes by on video.
New Adult Obesity Maps
When I go over this in class, it is not a popular topic at all. I'm not thin and kind of hover on the boundary between overweight and obese, so that's one of my underlying conditions too. That makes it easier for students to come up to me after class and ask questions. I've also done a public lecture series on obesity in certain ethnic communities that have genetics that put them more at risk for being overweight (like Hawaiians and Hualapai Indians; some others).
I wasn't overweight for the first ⅔ of my life though, which is a helpful part of a person's history. Young people who are obese are at risk for dying from CV19 (and of the young dying, a considerable number are obese), but they will remain at risk for CV19 for the rest of their lives, each time they are out in a crowd, until we get a vaccine or better therapeutics, they are risking CV19. Statistically, though, they might be better off getting it in their 20's - so yeah, opening up may have some beneficial results for some of the people with underlying conditions. Being obese decade after decade will take its toll on this overweight-to-obese 20-somethings. The little kids who are obese will be at more risk 10 years from now, when they hit their 20's.
I guess we'll get used to all of this.
