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COVID-19, which has killed more than 600,000 people in the United States, has had an especially devastating impact on the millions of Americans with diabetes.
Health professionals and scientists noticed early on that many severely ill coronavirus patients also had the chronic disease. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cites research showing that 40% or more of the people who died with COVID-19 also had diabetes.
And those numbers don’t reflect the damage the pandemic inflicted on diabetes patients who never got sick from the virus but fell victim to the isolation and disruption it caused.
Deaths from diabetes last year surged 17% to more than 100,000, based on a Reuters analysis of CDC data.
Younger people – those ages 25 to 44 – suffered the sharpest increase, with a 29% jump in deaths. By comparison, all other deaths except those directly attributed to the coronavirus rose 6% last year, Reuters found.
(Reuters)