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Is Trump a high-risk Covid-19 patient? Why 'overweight' POTUS' age, weight increases chances of hospitalization

Patients between the ages of 65 and 74 are five times more likely to be hospitalized with Covid-19 than an individual aged between 18 and 29, as per CDC statistics

President Donald Trump, who tested positive for Covid-19 on Friday, October 2, is 74 years old and hence can be categorized as a high-risk patient as he is more than five times more likely to be hospitalized from the disease and 90 times more likely to die than a patient in their 20s, according to the information on coronavirus shared by the Centers For Disease Control And Prevention (CDC). 

Just hours after top White House aide Hope Hicks was confirmed to have contracted the virus, the first couple confirmed they had both tested positive for coronavirus early Friday. "Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!" the POTUS tweeted, followed by Melania's post, which said, "As too many Americans have done this year, @potus & I are quarantining at home after testing positive for COVID-19. We are feeling good & I have postponed all upcoming engagements. Please be sure you are staying safe & we will all get through this together." 

Patients between the ages of 65 and 74 are five times more likely to be hospitalized with Covid-19 than an individual aged between 18 and 29, as per CDC statistics. Given his age, Trump also had a 90 times greater risk of death due to the virus. There is a fatality rate of 11.6 percent or in other words, 116 people out of a 1000 in their mid-seventies or older who are infected by Covid-19 have died. The overall death rate for people with Covid-19 was 1.4%

Earlier this year, the CDC said that anyone considered "severely obese" may have a higher risk of a severe reaction to Covid-19. Trump’s physician Dr Sean Conley revealed following an annual physical of the president that he was 6 feet, 3 inches tall and 244 pounds, which meant he had gained one pound since his last examination in 2019. It also showed the president's cholesterol level had slightly improved to 167 from 196 the year before. Trump’s height and weight would equate to a body mass index (BMI) of 30.4 - a fraction over the 30.0 level to be considered obese in the lowest of three tiers. 

Dr Barry Dixon, an intensive care physician at St Vincent’s hospital in Melbourne, told The Guardian Trump’s risk would increase, especially if he develops pneumonia. "He’s at a much higher risk of dying if he does develop that bad pneumonia," Dixon said. "There are other risk factors and co-morbidities such as whether you are a heavy smoker, have diabetes, or have heart disease. The key risk factors for Trump that we know about are his age and the fact he’s overweight, and they’d be high-risk factors."

He added that around the one-week mark people with the virus either seemed to improve or decline rapidly. "We tend to see people with very mild symptoms for the first week, that is typical, and in the second week typically people either develop pneumonia or not," he said. "If you see someone who just got it, they’ve just tested positive, typically they look well. But we would tell those patients to isolate at home and to come to hospital if they feel short of breath. Because in that second week of the virus, people can go from looking very good to pretty rotten even over just 24 to 48 hours. It’s a quick deterioration, and that’s what we saw with [British prime minister] Boris Johnson."

Infectious diseases physician Prof Peter Collignon listed a number of measures as he had concerns for "anyone with COVID." "My advice would be first of all, check his underlying conditions such as heart and lung conditions, and from there you’d make an assessment of whether he stays home or goes to hospital," he was quoted as saying by The Guardian. "If he’s well enough to walk and breathe OK, then he’d be fine to go home for a while. But a proportion will deteriorate between five to seven days later, so you’d need to monitor how he is breathing and how he looks."

Professor Christine Jenkins, head of the respiratory group at The George Institute for Global Health, said that sine statistics for the virus were constantly changing as new treatments came up in the study of the virus, it was difficult to predict what Trump's chances of being admitted to intensive care or surviving the virus were. "Early on we thought if you had COVID, were admitted to intensive care and over 70, you had only a 40-to-50% chance of survival," Jenkins said. "Today, those figures are not that bad, and we have had study results come out with promising findings about treatments for people who do become severely unwell, such as the drug dexamethasone."