How COVID-19 laid bare America's diabetes crisis

It took the deadly disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic to expose a deeper, more intractable U.S. public-health crisis: for more than a decade, the world's richest nation has been losing the battle against diabetes.

Emma Jehle reports.

The deadly COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a deeper U.S. public-health crisis.

For more than a decade, the nation has been losing the battle against diabetes.

Here are the stories of diabetes patients who fell victim to the isolation and disruptions the pandemic caused, even if they weren't infected with the coronavirus.

Elicia Heaston had a best friend – Kate Herrin.

(ELICIA HEASTON): "Kate was my best friend, but really my sister.

We met like 26 years ago in high school in our English class, and we just developed a friendship." Long before the pandemic, Herrin was among the millions of Americans struggling to control their diabetes.

Then COVID-19 hit.

Poor and living alone, Herrin rarely left her apartment.

She stopped going in for regular lab tests, and had a harder time than ever securing medical supplies.

Her health deteriorated further, until the worst happened.

(ELICIA HEASTON): "They found her on the bathroom floor.

I heard them radio down that there was an unconscious female on the bathroom floor and I completely lost it.

The police had me unlock her phone with the passcode and I unlocked the phone and the last thing she had Googled, what was up on her phone was the signs of a heart attack.” The coroner attributed the heart attack that killed Herrin to complications of type 2 diabetes.

Heaston says Herrin was afraid COVID would kill her.

Instead, it isolated her, and her diabetes got worse.

(ELICIA HEASTON): "It's every day I think about her, every day.

There's not one day that since she's passed that I don't think about her." 68-year-old John Cupo works as a building systems manager in Las Vegas.

He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes more than a decade ago.

Then, in November 2019, he spotted a sore on his left foot.

His podiatrist blamed diminished blood circulation due to diabetes and treated the sore.

After that, Cupo agreed to visit every other week for checkups.

But COVID-19 upended his routine.

(JOHN CUPO): "I was too afraid to leave the house to go into a crowded doctor's office or anything like that.

So I just stayed home and I was trying to treat it myself, and it just kept getting worse and worse.

My foot kept getting worse, so I went to see my new podiatrist, who I had met at the hospital, and he said he needed to amputate my toes.

And then my foot ended up … the bone got infected.

That's what happened.

And the amputation of the toes didn't work because a week later, my foot turned black and I went to the foot doctor and he said I had to have my leg amputated." Cupo had a difficult four-month recovery after the amputation.

He has since grown accustomed to his prosthetic, but says he believes he would still have his leg if it weren’t for COVID scaring him to stay home.

The ranks of the newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes patients are shifting younger.

In part, that’s because more and more Americans are living in “obesogenic” environments where they exercise less, eat more processed foods, and gain excessive weight at an earlier age.

The isolation and inactivity imposed by the pandemic compounded many of those risks.

At Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., diagnoses of type 2 diabetes among patients 8 to 20 years old nearly tripled in the first year of the pandemic.

One of the hospital’s new patients is 15-year-old Adedotun Adebayo.

(ADEDOTUN ADEBAYO): "I was a pretty active person before Covid, so when Covid hit and everything shut down and all the gyms were closed and everything, I really didn't do much exercise and I think that's probably one of the factors that contributed to me getting diabetes.

Yeah, I gained a lot of weight." In March this year, Adebayo was rushed to the ICU after having passed out at church.

(ADEDOTUN ADEBAYO): "I woke up and I was in the hospital like I've seen the movie movies like with the little bed that moves and everything, and I had wires and I had all this beeping stuff around me.

And I remember I couldn't, I couldn't talk.

I couldn't talk, my speech was very slurred.

And I couldn't … I didn't even want to eat.

I didn't feel hungry.

I just I just kept asking for water." These days, Adebayo says he tries to wake up earlier and eat a better diet.

He counts the carbohydrates in his food so he can correctly dose his meal-time insulin injections.

He also takes metformin, the first-line drug for type 2 diabetes.

Deaths from diabetes surged 17% to more than 100,000 in the U.S. in 2020.

That’s according to a Reuters analysis of CDC data.

This grim toll is the result of a public-health failure that long predates the pandemic, and it is almost certain to persist after COVID-19 abates.