Lockdown, essential sectors, and Covid-19: Lessons from Italy.

This paper investigates how economic activity impacted Covid-19 infections and all-cause mortality. To this purpose, we exploit the distribution of essential sectors, which were exempted from a national lockdown enacted in Italy during the first wave of the pandemic, across provinces and rich administrative data in a difference-in-differences framework. We find that a standard deviation increase in essential workers per built square kilometre leads to 1.1 additional daily cases and 0.32 additional daily deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that about one third (47,000) of the Covid-19 cases and about 13% (13,000) of deaths between March and May of 2020 can be attributed to the less stringent lockdown for these sectors. The effect is heterogeneous across sectors. Finally, we find that the local health system played a relevant role in reducing fatalities with a higher number of general practitioners and hospital beds per capita being associated with a lower mortality.

Potential impact of gradual reduction of fat content in manufactured and out-of-home food on obesity in the United Kingdom: a modeling study.

BACKGROUND: Manufactured and out-of-home foods contribute to excessive calories and have a critical role in fueling the obesity epidemic. We propose a 20% fat reduction in these foods. OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the potential impact of the proposed strategy on energy intake, obesity and related health outcomes in the population. METHODS: We used the National Diet and Nutrition Survey rolling program (NDNS RP) data to calculate fat and energy contributions from 46 manufactured and out-of-home food categories. We considered a gradual fat reduction-focusing on SFA-in these categories to achieve a 20% reduction in 5 years. We estimated the reduction in energy intake in the NDNS RP population and predicted the body weight reduction using a weight loss model. We scaled up the body weight reduction to the UK adult population. We estimated reductions in overweight/obesity and type 2 diabetes cases. We calculated the reductions of LDL, ischemic heart disease (IHD), and stroke deaths that could be prevented from the SFA reduction. RESULTS: The selected categories contributed to 38.6% of the population's energy intake. By the end of the fifth year, our proposed strategy would reduce the mean energy intake by 67.6 kcal/d/person (95% CI: 66.1-68.8). The energy reduction would reduce the mean body weight by 2.7 kg (95% CI: 2.6-2.8). The obesity prevalence would be reduced by 5.3% and the overweight prevalence by 1.5%, corresponding to 3.5 and 1 million cases of obesity and overweight, respectively, being reduced in the United Kingdom. The body weight reduction could prevent 183,000 (95% CI: 171,000-194,000) cases of type 2 diabetes over 2 decades. Energy from SFA would fall by 2.6%, lowering LDL by 0.13 mmol/L and preventing 87,560 IHD deaths (95% CI: 82,260-112,760) and 9520 stroke deaths (95% CI: 4400-14,660) over 20 years. CONCLUSIONS: A modest fat reduction (particularly in SFA) in widely consumed foods would prevent obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.