Sindemia de obesidade e COVID-19: uma sobreposição pandémica e o reforço das desigualdades de saúde

Abstract

Obesity has emerged as a strong risk factor for severe COVID-19 infection, making individuals with obesity more susceptible to hospitalisation, assisted ventilation and death. This article reflects how obesity and COVID-19 compose a pandemic overlap of syndemic effects whose synergies reinforce both biological and structural disadvantages reproducing and exacerbate persistent health disparities and inequalities over time. The case of obesity, and its ecology of health problems, constitutes a global health challenge that points to the need to look at health in a broader framework which takes into account how the central drivers of society, and the economic and social policy under neoliberalism, affect the distribution of health and disease, potentially conditioning other pandemic viral crises in the future.

Keywords

• COVID-19
• neoliberal epidemic
• obesity
• stigma
• syndemics