Lessons From COVID-19: Physical Exercise Can Improve and Optimize Health Status, 2022, Cerasola et al

The outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused increasing challenges for healthcare systems globally. The disease spread rapidly from Wuhan to the rest of the world, involving more than 400 million individuals and including more than 5 million deaths. In dealing with the pandemic, China and other countries took protective measures such as promoting social distancing, canceling public gatherings, closing schools, quarantining, and imposing lockdowns. All these measures lead to physical inactivity. Being physically inactive has significant repercussions on the status of physical and mental wellbeing, and it is associated with anxiety, stress, increased chronic disease risk, and worsening of chronic conditions. In this sense, the relevance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle through physical exercise has been outlined by the World Health Organization (WHO). The aim of this mini review is to discuss the importance of physical activity in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the benefits of physical activity and exercise that could be potentially effective treatment strategies for comorbid chronic conditions, long covid syndrome (LCS), and symptoms such as depression and anxiety.

Open access, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2022.834844/full

 

The logical fallacy in going from the specific to the general is centre stage in this argument.

It is as rational to say that given glucose may boost short term athletic performance in a healthy person in specific circumstances, we should regularly give diabetics glucose without reference to their insulin levels.

Even if it was safe to ignore the risks from PEM there are the issues of potential cardiac and lung damage following Covid-19.

The main title would more appropriately be “Lessons not learned from Covid-19”.

 

I'm always wary when the word "can" is used in these contexts. Drinking milk can benefit your health, but will harm those who are lactose intolerant. But at least in that example the dangers are well understood and determinable, and can be averted before any real lasting damage is done.

 

The main goal of science is to determine "does it, here, in those conditions?". And they're not doing that because none of this is scientific in any way, because EBM is an alternative method that yields unreliable, but desirable results.

Remaining at the vague stage of "can" is one thing, but remaining there for decades and insisting it's good enough to coerce people with the implications of those beliefs is complete dereliction of duty, being unable to move on from a belief system, which is just about as antiscientific as can be.