When quarantine first started I was motivated to work out more often. Twice a day even. For starters, it would help pass the time and make me feel like I was being productive. But I actually had an ulterior motive as well: to get into fighting shape in case I needed to go into survival mode during an imminent zombie apocalypse. The end result: I fell off my bike, broke my arm and haven’t been able to work out at all for two months.
But this is actually good news! Because my inability to work out may have actually saved my life.
As Wired puts it:
“From the images of cloudy chest scans and gasping patients hooked up to ventilators, we’ve been conditioned to think of Covid-19 as a respiratory disease. But it’s not just about the lungs. Even from the early days of the pandemic, doctors were finding that a novel coronavirus infection could ravage other parts of the body, including the brain, blood vessels, and heart. Data from initial outbreaks in China, New York City, and Washington state suggested that 20 to 30 percent of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 showed signs of cardiac injury.
That these patients tended to get sicker and died more often than patients without cardiac complications didn’t set off immediate alarm bells. These were, after all, people with serious cases of Covid-19—serious enough to wind up in the hospital. Most people who contract the virus experience a spectrum of less-severe symptoms. As many as one in three never feel sick. But now, evidence is emerging that the virus can cause heart damage even in people who’ve had mild symptoms or none at all, especially if those people exercise while they’re infected.
Last month, when league commissioners from the Big Ten and Pac-12 college conferences announced they would be postponing the 2020 fall sports season, one of the major factors they cited were concerns over something called myocarditis. That’s cardiologist-speak for what happens when the muscular walls of the heart become inflamed, weakening the organ and making it more difficult for it to pump blood. It’s not a newly discovered condition, and it turns up pretty rarely, but when it does, it’s most often triggered by an infection. Viruses, bacteria, even invading amoebas, yeasts, and worms have all been shown to cause it.
What they have in common is that they jolt the body’s immune system into attack mode, leading to inflammation. If a person rests while they are ill and during recovery, most of the time the inflammation recedes and the heart muscle heals on its own. But strenuous activity while the heart is weakened can cause swelling in the legs, dizziness, shortness of breath, and—in serious cases—irregular heartbeat, cardiac arrest, and sudden death.”
So, just to recap…COVID-19 can cause heart damage in people, even if they have mild or no symptoms, and they are at even more risk if they exercise, which they’re more likely to do if they don’t think they are that sick or sick at all. This is insane!
This is exactly why I am strictly quarantining and taking this virus so seriously. It’s not just about my ability to recover from flu like symptoms. If I’m at risk of getting heart damage then I don’t want to ever get the virus at all. And it’s also why I might never work out again! Because what if I have COVID and don’t know it and wind up hurting myself even more by working out?! Of course, if I don’t work out I’ll get fat and out of shape and probably wind up with heart issues of my own via diabetes. Talk about damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
So, what recourse do we have? Vigilance for starters. Just be smart about it. And keep in mind that if you do get COVID, even if you are asymptomatic, to not work out right away. Being lazy could very well save your life.
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