Abstract
There is a challenging time to adopt the “New Normal” of living for the survival of humanity to fight against the pandemic of COVID-19. The new emerging infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) leads to serious public health risk that resulting to damage immune function within a host. Body has a specific and nonspecific immune mechanism to recognize and eliminate the viral infection. Since it is difficult to avoid completely from being in contact with those who are asymptomatic with positive (active infection), indispensably the host defense mechanism has to be strengthened enough to get optimum functional health by enhancing the body’s natural immunity in the population.
Regular moderate exercise possibly has the potential to play a significant role in immune health care in terms of devising policies of prevention, management, and rehabilitation to deal with the deadly virus. Several studies proved the efficacy of moderate physical exercise in control and management of some lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, lung disease, cardiac disease, obesity, cancer, etc., which are also co-morbid conditions in patients with COVID-19. Exercise seems a strong relevance to be useful in vulnerable population such as children, elderly, and immunocompromised persons. Exercise favorably could be a powerful tool of healthy living when people apparently is becoming re-infected and there is no evidence around how long people might remain immune protected after exposure to COVID-19 for which herd immunity has not been achieved by the recovered population.
An ideal moderate exercises program has a great impact on the normal functioning of the immune system for supporting a strong resistance to fight infections against any virus and if infected recover quicker. Exercise is not an alternative to medicines but as supplementary, preventive, therapeutic, and rehabilitative measures to keep COVID-19 type of viral diseases away when vaccine immunity is known very little and while there is a possibility of both recovered and vaccinated persons may later become infected again.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are thankful to Jadavpur University RUSA 2.0 Major Research Support and University Grant Commission (UGC), Govt. of India. The authors thankfully acknowledge cooperation and help extended by the Office Staff of the Director of Physical Instruction, members of Sports Board, Physical Education department and Jadavpur University authority. The authors are grateful to Prof. Sadhan Kumar Ghosh, Professor & Former Head, Mechanical Engineering Department and Ex-Dean, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India for his expertise and valuable suggestions for smooth conduction of this study.
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Konar, A., Mondal, S. (2022). Exercise in Immune Health Management and Rehabilitation Against COVID-19. In: Ghosh, S.K., Agamuthu, P. (eds) Health Care Waste Management and COVID 19 Pandemic. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9336-6_14
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