Covid’s Four Horsemen

If you are like me, you are probably exhausted from all the discussion regarding the virus, SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19, the illness it causes. A lot of discussion had understandably focused on the rate of serious illness and death from Covid. The rates of both have been frightening (although the true rates are not really known for many reasons not germaine to this post) and served as justification for unprecedented measures to end the pandemic. If it were not for that, Covid would have been regarded as just another annoying seasonal virus, little different from the other coronaviruses, rhinoviruses, RSV (respiratory syncytial viruses), parainfluenza, and others we have not yet identified. We live with those as a matter of course. We now have enough experience with the “novel” virus unleashed on the world by the Chinese Communist Party to know that it uniquely spares children, poses relatively little risk to healthy adults, and is most dangerous to adults over 70 years-old and those with certain chronic medical conditions.

Those conditions are medically termed co-morbidities and include illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, asthma and other lung problems, obesity, diabetes, immune-related conditions of every sort, kidney disease, and so on. Among them are four that are noteworthy because they are so common and so commonly associated with serious illness and death from Covid. These are obesity, type II diabetes, hypertension, and metabolic syndrome. The last is basically a melding of the first three. In addition to having in common the fact that they greatly increase the risk of serious illness and death from Covid is the fact that they are all largely preventable.