At the beginning of 2022, the COVID crisis crushed every part of the healthcare system and American hospitals were in dire straits.

In 2021, the federal government released the information that in 2020, COVID-19 was the third most common cause of death in the USA.

Let’s catch up on what’s going on in the country with COVID-19, from hospitalizations to the lack of nurses to the most recent CDC guidelines.

“Kids don’t get COVID-19.” “They don’t get it very bad.” “They don’t spread it around.” Simultaneously, things constantly happen to prove otherwise.

Some assessments ignore the mounting evidence that long COVID is a very real threat to children, and the links between COVID and obesity are ominous too.

The rules around COVID prevention have been literally and figuratively all over the map and the latest responses to the epidemic also vary wildly.

Long COVID is a tedious game of whack-a mole, with new pains and weaknesses relentlessly turning up and needing to be dealt with.

We are looking at the journey to recognition, the road along which long COVID traveled to become acknowledged as a real and worrisome condition.

We are looking at how the consciousness of the serious nature of long COVID originated and then progressed over the ensuing months.

Just wait until all the kids who had COVID-19 and ostensibly got over it begin to show up with long COVID or MISC-C or some other long-term damage.

Long COVID patients cope with chest pain, heart palpitations, and shortness of breath, but the after-effects can also be much worse.

The struggle for recognition was not of the virus itself, of course, but of its insidious and invidious long-term effects.

A recent study of COVID-19 patients ages 12-17 found that of all underlying conditions, obesity was found to be the most common.

Obesity and COVID-19 have a relationship that goes far beyond compatibility. What a perfect recipe for an ever-increasingly obese population.

This is only a partial list of the obstacles families with kids face, and each one contributes in some way to the danger of increasing obesity.

Childhood obesity, already at an all-time high when the pandemic struck, is a prominent risk factor for catching the virus.

As “younger, sicker, quicker” became a slogan among medical personnel, the Delta variant was blamed. But it’s more complicated.

When authorities are deciding which children need to be hospitalized, obesity is a determinant. Diabetes also seems to get worse with COVID-19.

Many of the hospitalizations that are categorized as “with COVID” — like heart attacks, strokes, lung clots, etc. — are now seen as actually “for” COVID.

Obese people are more apt to catch COVID-19, more likely to get very sick, and more likely to die from it.

How are people still suffering from a disease that gives every sign of being over? Is the invader still on the scene, hiding perhaps in fat cells?

Now is the time to prevent children from becoming the plump, tasty morsels of victimhood that the SARS-CoV-2 organism enjoys so much.

These are tough questions, complicated by incomplete information, misunderstandings, misplaced blame, and, from some quarters, heedless indifference.

Long COVID tends to destroy careers, and the victims are not just people with low-income service jobs.

If the virus had eyes, its eyes would light up at the sight of a chubby child, and without waiting for an invitation, it would climb aboard.

People with diabetes are more likely to have severe cases of COVID-19, and this brings us back to the cozy relationship between COVID and obesity.

Long COVID symptoms may be falsely attributed to obesity alone, rather than share the responsibility with COVID. There is plenty of room for misdiagnosis.

Compared to less weighty people, the obese are more likely to get PASC, also known as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2., or Long COVID.

We have been looking at the science behind the deadly alliance between obesity and COVID-19.

Obesity helps COVID, and COVID returns the favor by helping fat. Here’s how.