Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his surrogates in the media and elsewhere are trying to blame the COVID-19 death toll on President Donald Trump. One recent tweet I saw compared South Korea’s death toll — 461 — with that of the United States — 232,000-plus and counting.

South Korea has a population of just over 51 million people. The United States has 330.5 million people. If all things were equal, South Korea would have lost over 35,000 people to COVID-19.

But clearly, they’re not equal. South Korea’s death rate is just 9 per 1 million people, while ours is 700 per 1 million people. That’s a staggering difference. And while our death rate per million people is not the highest (with the exception of Belgium, all the countries with higher death rates are in South America), it’s still shockingly high.

Democrats would like to lay this at the feet of Donald Trump. But the truth is much more complicated, diffused and personal.

One major factor complicating the COVID-19 death toll in the U.S. is our obesity rate. Trust for America’s Health recently published a report titled “The State of Obesity 2020.” According to data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2017-2018, 42 percent of American adults were obese. Not merely overweight — obese. Nine percent were “severely” obese. (How do we compare with the rest of the world? America has the 12th highest obesity rate among 191 countries. South Korea, by comparison, is 183rd, with only 4.7 percent of its population obese.)

This is the highest number ever recorded, and it is part of a disturbing trend. Not only are more adults obese but levels of obesity in children and young people are increasing as well. The Global Pediatric Health journal calls obesity in youth an “epidemic,” reporting that obesity has doubled in children and tripled in adolescents just since 1990.

These numbers are terribly important because obesity is closely associated with other serious health disorders including respiratory problems such as asthma, sleep apnea, arthritis, gout, hypertension (high blood pressure), heart attacks, strokes, Type 2 diabetes and even certain cancer. The human toll obesity exacts is heartbreaking and immeasurable. The financial toll, however, is measurable. The CDC also estimates the health care costs associated with obesity to be $147 billion each year .

America’s weight problem and related disorders are also playing a huge and underarticulated role in COVID-19’s fatality rate in the United States. A much-misinterpreted CDC report revealed that 94 percent of all COVID-19 deaths occurred in individuals with one or more co-morbidities — serious health problems that were contributing causes to death. Some of those co-morbidities — most notably, pneumonia — were caused by COVID-19 itself. But many others, such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and renal failure — preexisted the viral infection; COVID-19 dealt the final blow.

The obesity factor is also increasingly being used to explain the impact COVID-19 is having on certain segments of the U.S. population. By way of example, although younger people tend not to be as seriously affected by COVID-19 as the elderly, of those killed by COVID-19 who were under age 45, more than 60 percent were obese. Similarly, obesity rates by ethnicity or racial identification are relevant to death rates but disproportionate to their share of the U.S. population. Non-Hispanic Blacks represent 13 percent of the U.S. population but have the highest COVID-19 mortality rate of any group — two times that of whites and Asians. The next highest mortality group is among indigenous peoples (less than 1 percent of the population), followed by Latinos (only 16.7 percent of the population). Asian Americans have the lowest mortality rate from COVID-19.

No matter who is elected president next week, this country needs to get serious about the health of its citizens. Our government — at every level — must make reducing obesity in Americans a top public health priority.

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Laura Hollis is a nationally syndicated columnist.