Opinion: My friend was scared to death of COVID. I told him to get a colonoscopy.

My friend is well past the age of 45, which is when experts suggest colonoscopies should start becoming a periodic part of your medical-testing regimen. But he isn’t exactly a poster child in terms of following doctor’s orders. In fact, he doesn’t bother with doctors almost at all.

And yet, he has taken every possible COVID precaution, from avoiding almost any contact with others in the early days of the pandemic to maintaining being masked in public settings well after. Naturally, he got vaccinated and boosted as well.

My spell with COVID has me thinking a lot about people like him and how Americans as a whole acted with such concern regarding the virus. And rightly so: To date, more than 1.1 million Americans have died from COVID and more than 6.5 million have been hospitalized due to it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Still, it’s remarkable to consider how COVID conscious we became. Perhaps the most telling statistic: 81.4% of the U.S. population received at least one dose of the COVID vaccine, according to the CDC. And when it comes to one of the most vulnerable groups — those 65 years or older — that figure is 95%.

Now let’s look at some telling and troubling non-COVID stats that reveal our broader attitudes about health. Like the fact that about 42% of Americans are obese and, for certain populations, that figure rises to almost 50%, according to the CDC. Remember: Obesity is linked to many serious medical conditions, including becoming severely ill from COVID.

Or how about this: Our infant mortality rate, while still relatively low compared to many other countries (though not all), actually increased in 2022, according to a new report from the National Vital Statistics System. That’s the first time that’s happened in two decades, the report noted.

But as long as we’re comparing ourselves to the rest of the world, here’s the thing that surprised me the most. When it comes to overall health of the population, the U.S. doesn’t even crack the top 10 in some surveys. Bloomberg’s 2019 Global Health Index had us ranking 35^th. A more recent report, from CEOWORLD magazine, put us in the No. 45 spot. Not exactly something that’s cause for a chant of “USA! USA! USA!”

You could write books about the reasons for this — and many indeed have. But when I spoke to medical experts who pay close attention to these matters, one cause quickly emerged: Namely, our health-care system is geared far more to responding to illness than preventing it.

“We are structurally set up to be reactive rather than proactive,” said Matt Fellowes, chief executive of BellSant, a healthcare platform.

It’s something that almost any emergency-room physician will tell you they see first-hand on a daily basis. Many of the cases they treat involve patients who don’t have a regular doctor or who let issues go unchecked until they rise to critical status. Consider that obese individual now lying in the ER with a heart attack.

Of course, underlying this is the fact we don’t fund public-health programs at a proper level, experts agree. As a result, we make it harder and cost-prohibitive for many people to find the care they need. And we don’t get the word out effectively for people to know what they should do to safeguard their health in the first place.

So, how did we get it right with COVID? This was a case of public-health programs living up to their ideals and being adequately funded to do so, experts say. Think of how the vaccines were made widely available and you could get them almost any day of the week and almost any time of day, especially in the beginning. Think of the constant messaging we received about social distancing.

Still, the difference with COVID is that it was impossible to avoid hearing about it — I alone had three friends whose parents died from it. Or as Dr. John Roberts, a Los Angeles-based emergency-room physician and the emergency medical adviser for the global disaster-relief health nonprofit International Medical Corps, told me: “The awareness of it kind of took care of itself.”

But does that make these other health issues any less concerning? After all, some 52,000 Americans are expected to die this year from colorectal cancer alone, according to the American Cancer Society. And it’s the worst kind of killer in that it’s a silent one — you won’t know you have it until it’s often too late to do anything about it. Unless you get that colonoscopy.

Not that I’m holding myself up as a paradigm of healthy behavior. I have been obese most of my adult life — at least until recently. My exercise habits have been far from exemplary — again, until recently. But I will say I have gotten a colonoscopy and other necessary tests when doctors advised me to do so.

This isn’t about me, however. It’s about how Americans treated COVID as the ultimate threat to their health — the bogeyman of medical bogeymen — without paying mind to so many other illnesses and conditions, including some that are fully preventable. And while the last thing I want to do is make light of COVID, especially given the pernicious presence of long COVID, I should note that I’m almost recovered from my latest bout, much as I recovered relatively quickly from the previous time I had it. You can’t generally say that about a heart attack.

For that matter, even my friend who’s been so worried about COVID readily withstood a case of it when he contracted the virus earlier this year for the first time ever.

Now, if only I could convince him to get that colonoscopy.

Related: ‘COVID isn’t done with us’: So why have so many people started rolling the dice?