The suggestion wasn't that they were dying from obesity, but from its correlation with covid. Not sure if it can account for the increase, but in conjunction with pretty terrible handling of the crisis during 2020 I could imagine it at least.

That makes sense, I misunderstood, thanks.

the US was already more obese than Germany -- and obesity seems to correlate with higher covid-19 mortality

I'm assuming tokai is saying that because obese people are more likely to have complications from Covid19, the US saw a higher increase in excess deaths, given that the obesity rate is higher than eg Germany.

This also explains some of the racial disparities in COVID deaths since the obesity rate for blacks is 49.6% vs 44.8% for Hispanics, 42.2% for whites, and 17.4% for Asians

Oh, I see, I thought they meant that the excess deaths were caused by obesity, not by COVID19 leading to higher rates of death among the obese. That makes more sense.

But the pandemic could have hit the more obese American population harder.