How Fatphobia Is Leading to Poor Care in the Pandemic
Weight stigma in health care can impact the care people get for Covid-19
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On October 24, Amanda Martinez Beck of Longview, Texas, told her husband: “You need to take me to the ER.” Their whole family had tested positive for Covid-19 a week earlier — Beck’s husband, Zachary, is an English professor and their best guess is that he brought the virus home from campus, or that Beck picked it up at the community pool where she sometimes swims. Within a few days, Zachary and their four children were all on the mend. But despite prescription albuterol, steroids, and antibiotics, Beck was still coughing and sleeping in a recliner at night because staying upright made it easier to breathe. Around 10 a.m. that Saturday morning, her blood oxygen level was just 92%. (A healthy adult should measure close to 100.) Beck packed a bag and Zachary drove her to their nearest emergency room. He couldn’t stay; the Becks’ children are ages four, five, seven, and eight, and they couldn’t call a babysitter since the family was still in quarantine. So Beck kissed them all goodbye, trying not to panic. “My husband thought he was never going to see me again,” she says now.
Beck had another fear underlying her anxiety about her Covid-19 prognosis: Would she, a fat activist and author of Lovely: How I Learned to Embrace the Body God Gave Me, get the medical care she needed? “Fatphobia is an ever-present concern when you’re dealing with medical issues,” she says.
The coronavirus pandemic has brought the relationship between weight stigma and health into sharp focus. In April, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report noting that 48% of patients then hospitalized with Covid-19 had a Body Mass Index (BMI) in the “obese” range (compared with 42% of Americans as a whole). A French study published in the journal Obesity around the same time found that Covid-19 patients with a BMI of 35 or higher were more likely to need a ventilator. Most recently, an analysis of 6,916 people with Covid-19 in California found that men with a BMI above 40 had a higher risk of dying from the disease than those with a BMI in the normal range, according to findings published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. A flurry of other medical reports — and an even…
