40 Percent of People Who’ve Died from COVID-19 Had Diabetes, Researchers Say
Healthline’s recent article by Bob Curley on COVID-19 featured comments by Silver Fern’s Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Garry Welch, Ph.D.
The piece shares devastating data about the relationship between diabetes and death from COVID-19, including that while 1 in 10 Americans has diabetes, 40% of those who have died from COVID-19 had type 1 or type 2 diabetes.
“We are now learning that many Americans who hunkered down over the past year and a half to avoid infection report that their diet is even poorer, they feel more isolated, and are experiencing higher levels of additional stress from COVID-19,” Dr. Garry Welch, chief scientific officer and co-founder at Silver Fern Healthcare, told Healthline.
Dr. Welch’s 30+ years of published research in behavior medicine are the foundation of his expertise and his approach to chronic disease prevention and management. Welch co-founded Silver Fern Healthcare in order to provide clinicians and care delivery teams with effective ways to assess and address the issues that underlie lifestyle-related chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes. In nearly all cases, lifestyle-related chronic diseases are preventable or reversible with proper treatment, but the healthcare system is hyper-concentrated on acute care and medical treatments, which research shows contribute to only 10% of patient outcomes and rarely focus on disease prevention. With 30% of patient outcomes attributed to genetics, the real opportunity to affect patient outcomes and avoid the most severe complication is by influencing the 60% of outcomes attributed to individual behaviors and social/environmental factors.
Silver Fern’s first-of-its-kind behavior diagnostic and decision support platform was built from Dr. Welch’s research. It enables clinicians and patients to identify and understand all the facets of a patient’s health and unlock those behaviors and psychosocial barriers that, until now, went unexplored and unaddressed.