The Comorbidity Fallacy

The Trump Administration and other GOP apologists have been pushing the fallacious notion that because most of the people who die of COVID-19 have some sort of underlying medical condition, the virus isn’t as deadly as it seems.

The notion is ludicrous because the majority of people period have one of the underlying medical conditions.

According to the CDC, the most common underlying condition is cardiovascular disease (60.9%). But look at this from Science Daily:

Nearly half (48 percent, 121.5 million in 2016) of all adults in the United States have some type of cardiovascular disease, according to the American Heart Association’s Heart and Stroke Statistics — 2019 Update, published in the Association’s journal Circulation.

The next most common comorbidity is diabetes (39.5%). The CDC reports that 1 in 10 Americans have diabetes, and 1 in 3 have prediabetes.

Chronic kidney disease is next (20.8%). According to the National Kidney Foundation:

Chronic kidney disease, or CKD, causes more deaths than breast cancer or prostate cancer. It is the under-recognized public health crisis. It affects an estimated 37 million people in the U.S. (15% of the adult population; more than 1 in 7 adults) and approximately 90% of those with CKD don’t even know they have it.