COVID-19: Hands, face, space, fresh air ... and exercise! The missing intervention to reduce disease burden.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on patient lifestyles with new measures designed to reduce transmission of the virus drastically transforming life as we know it. Public health interventions — alongside advances in medical treatments, vaccine technology, and gene sequencing — have drastically reduced the impact of the pandemic across the world. Yet there has been relatively little focus on the potential role of physical activity (PA) in reducing disease burden during the pandemic. We discuss the latest evidence related to the role of exercise or physical pre-rehabilitation before infection and consider whether this may be an overlooked public health strategy. ### Living with COVID-19: ’Exercise is medicine.’ As we progress through the second year of the pandemic, there has been a renewed focus on adjustments that individuals and society will have to make as we continually adapt to life with COVID-19. Key public health messages regarding the importance of ’ hands, face, space and fresh air ‘ appear prominently on all government briefings but exercise, once famously quoted as being the ‘ miracle cure ’ by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, is conspicuously absent.1 Despite the evidence supporting the physical and mental health benefits of exercise at a population level, there remains a …