In the past six weeks I’ve been consulting with a group of global diabetes experts. As a team they are assessing COVID-19’s impact on people with diabetes and how we can keep ourselves safer. I’ve published two articles as a result of this collaboration.

Published on Diabetes Daily, UK Study Under Review Finds People With Type 1 Diabetes More at Risk to Die of COVID-19 Than People With Type 2 Diabetes is an important finding that’s being studied –  once people with type 1 diabetes are hospitalized for COVID-19, they fare worse than people with type 2 who are hospitalized with it. The reason is thought to be that those with type 1 have more vascular damage after years of fluctuating blood sugars.

  “NHS (United Kingdom National Health Service) research reports that people with type 1 diabetes are at 3.5x higher risk for death if they get COVID-19 than people without diabetes. In contrast, people with type 2 diabetes are twice as likely to die as people without diabetes.”

The second article published at diaTribe, Adapting Diabetes Prevention And Treatment Guidelines During COVID-19 And Designing A New Model of Care is a summary of the group’s findings and recommendations to date.

“1. The best prevention against COVID-19, outside of the general recommendation of social distancing and washing your hands, is to keep oneself nutritionally and metabolically healthy.”

Both will help inform you how to move through this difficult time.

Let’s all stay safe: wear a mask, physically distance, wash your hands and keep your blood sugar in range as best you can. That advice we’ve been given since day one has never been more important.