Excessive sitting time as predictor of COVID-19 severity
A large body of recent research has identified that excessive time spent sitting down is a major risk factor for mortality from all causes and that it directly contributes to a range of health issues prevalent in first-world countries. Many of those health issues have also been identified as significant co-morbidities contributing to mortality in COVID-19 patients. One can infer that in aggregate, amount of time spent sitting will be a good predictor of COVID-19 mortality. This would be expected even in the absence of diagnosed co-morbidities because multiple of those risk factors are likely to be present at sub-clinical levels in individuals who sit excessively. It is further hypothesized that the direct contribution of sitting to conditions conducive to blood clots will have a synergistic effect with COVID-19’s mechanisms for coagulopathy, resulting in clot formation in excess of what would be expected by adding those two risk contributions.
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