Preventive Measures to Follow During COVID-19
The best preventive measures against COVID-19 include boosting your own immunity and adopting the hygiene practices recommended by health authorities.
What Are the Best Practices in COVID-19 Pandemic?
The best practices during the COVID-19 pandemic include boosting your own immunity to fend off potential viral infection, keeping excellent personal hygiene, practicing social distancing, wearing a high-quality mask, and keeping good ventilation indoors.
According to almost all national health regulators around the world, receiving COVID-19 vaccines can also prevent severe COVID-19 symptoms and deaths. However, some doctors and health organizations question the effectiveness and safety of these vaccines, given the many side effects and adverse events after COVID-19 vaccination. Several national authorities have also paused the use of certain vaccines for younger age groups.
How do You Stay Healthy When You have COVID-19?
After getting infected by COVID-19, there are many ways to recover and stay as healthy as possible.
1.) Asymptomatic COVID-19 Patients
Unless they’re tested for COVID-19, most of these patients don’t realize that they have been infected by COVID-19. In this case, many practices that can boost immunity can also be used to maintain their bodies’ health. These include eating a balanced diet containing lots of vegetables, proteins, and fruits, doing physical exercises, and sleeping well.
2.) COVID-19 Patients with Mild symptoms
These patients usually don’t need to seek medical help, as they can typically recover on their own. They can take some vitamin supplements and over-the-counter medications (e.g. acetaminophen) as per their physician’s recommendations.
They should familiarize themselves with the COVID-19 warning signs, and monitor their symptoms, in case their conditions take a turn for the worse. Furthermore, they should stay hydrated, eat well, and get enough rest. If their symptoms become severe, they should go to the hospital’s emergency department or call an ambulance.
READ MORE : Side Effects From COVID-19 Vaccines
3.) COVID-19 Patients With Severe Symptoms
These patients should immediately seek medical help, by visiting a hospital’s emergency department or calling 911.
However, COVID-19 patients should first start wearing a mask (if they haven’t already been wearing one) and try to avoid crowded places (e.g. nightclubs and public transit) to minimize COVID-19 transmission. In countries that require self-isolation or quarantine, COVID-19 patients should follow the local restrictions.
How Can I Prevent COVID-19?
There are many ways to prevent COVID-19 infection, including:
1.) Boosting our own immunity: This is probably the most important and useful way to prevent COVID-19 infection. With an immune system that works effectively and efficiently, the invading virus can be destroyed once it tries to enter our body. Without a good immune system, even if one gets all the recommended doses of COVID-19 vaccines, his/her body may still get infected by COVID-19.
Some ways that can help boost our immunity include maintaining a balanced diet containing all the nutrients needed by our body, controlling our body weight, staying physically active, avoiding medications that can suppress our immunity, avoiding smoking/vaping/alcohol/marijuana, getting quality sleep, maintaining good relationships with people around us, spending more time in nature, basking under the sun for a moderate amount of time, reducing stress, keeping a positive attitude, practicing meditation, and doing qigong exercises.
2.) Keeping a safe distance (i.e. social distancing) from others, to reduce virus transmission. This safe distance is recommended to be at least 1 to 2 meters (around 3 to 6 feet).
3.) Maintaining excellent ventilation, especially indoors, by regularly opening windows to draw outside air.
4.) Keeping your hands clean by frequently washing them.
5.) Wearing a high-quality mask or respirator (e.g. N95 mask), when going to public places, especially indoor areas with poor ventilation. Make sure you wear the mask properly by covering your mouth and nose.
6.) Cover your mouth and nose with your bent elbow or a tissue anytime you cough or sneeze.
7.) Avoid crowded places and close contact with others, if possible, to limit your risk of getting infected by COVID-19. Examples of crowded places include nightclubs, restaurants, and choir practices.
8.) Try moving indoor activities outdoors, as this reduces the risk of COVID-19-containing aerosols concentrating in the air.
Why is Wearing a Mask Important During COVID-19?
Wearing a mask is important during the COVID-19 pandemic, as it can effectively protect against and limit the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The SARS-CoV-2 virus mainly spreads when an infected person talks, sneezes, breathes, or coughs, through droplets and aerosols (i.e. a suspension of virus-containing tiny particles or droplets in the air). Our immune barriers such as nasal mucus can help prevent us from “breathing in” the virus, and a mask also helps with this layer of the immune barrier. Therefore, many health authorities around the world have used masking as an important public health tool during the COVID-19 pandemic.
There are three major types of masks, including surgical masks, air-filtering respirators, and cloth facial coverings. All three can reduce the risk of exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 infections, to different degrees. Among them, N95 masks are a commonly used type of air-filtering respirator.
According to a study on different masks’ protection against an avian flu virus, N95 masks, surgical masks, and homemade masks (i.e. regular facial coverings) can block 99.98 percent, 97.14 percent, and 95.15 percent of the virus in aerosols. However, for some people, wearing N95 masks is uncomfortable, and they cannot wear them for a long time.
Children under the age of two and people with difficulty breathing or other respiratory conditions are not recommended to wear masks.
Which Type of Ventilation is Required for COVID-19?
Ventilation also plays an important role in reducing COVID-19 transmission indoors. As the SARS-CoV-2 virus can be transmitted through aerosols produced by people infected by COVID-19, with poor indoor ventilation, aerosols would become concentrated in the air as time passes, thus increasing the risk of aerosol transmission.
Ventilating an indoor space can dilute and replace the potentially aerosol-contaminated air with fresh outdoor air, thus reducing the risk of COVID-19 infection. By removing the aerosols along with the virus particles contained within them, ventilation can also reduce the risk of surface transmission as these virus particles wouldn’t have the chance of falling onto surfaces from the air.
What Is a Safe Distance to Stay Apart From Others?
Health authorities around the world promote physical/social distancing, which is supposed to limit close contact between people. The recommended safe distance between two individuals varies among different countries/health authorities. For instance, the recommended social distance is at least 1 meter according to the World Health Organization, and 1 meter was the recommendation in France, Denmark, Hong Kong, and Singapore; the recommended social distance is 1.5 meters in Australia, Belgium, Greece, some German states, and Portugal. The social distance was 1.5 meters in Germany, Italy, and Spain. While the CDC recommends a social distance of 6 feet, the Canadian government recommends a safe distance of 2 meters (a little more than 6 feet). Switzerland reduced its social distance from 2 meters to 1.5 meters before removing the rule in May 2022. And the UK reduced its recommendation from 2 meters to one meter plus before removing the social distancing rule in July 2021.
How Do I Take Care of My Hands During COVID-19?
As we often touch our face, eyes, mouth, and nose with our hands, the SARS-CoV-2 virus can be transmitted in the process. In order to prevent COVID-19 infection, regular handwashing is very important. We need to wash our hands before and after cooking or preparing food, before having a meal or snack, after using the restroom, after touching garbage or waste, and so on.
When washing our hands, we should use soap and scrub or rub our hands for 20 seconds, in order to wash off the virus and prevent its transmission.
In times when running water and soap are unavailable, hand sanitizers can be used. However, they are not as effective as water and soap in terms of killing bacteria and the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
READ MORE: Less Than 1 in 100 Million Chance That COVID-19 Has Natural Origin
What Are the 4 Types of COVID-19 Vaccines?
There are four types of COVID-19 vaccines that have been developed or are in development. And each type of these vaccines has two subtypes of its own. So, altogether, there are 8 subtypes of COVID-19 vaccines.
These vaccines include nucleic acid vaccines (e.g. DNA-based vaccines and mRNA vaccines), viral vector vaccines (e.g. replicating viral vector and non-replicating viral vector vaccines), recombinant subunit vaccines (e.g. virus-like particle subunit vaccines and protein subunit vaccines), and whole virus vaccines (e.g. inactivated vaccines and live-attenuated vaccines).
Among them, nucleic acid vaccines use the latest technologies, and they used to be called “next-generation vaccines.” Prior to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, no nucleic acid vaccines were used in humans previously.
According to the CDC, these vaccines can all cause different side effects and adverse events, though rare in overall cases. Furthermore, possible vaccine injuries have also been reported by Reuters. In addition, according to a study published in the journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, COVID-19 vaccines can also potentially weaken the vaccine recipients’ immunity, as they might contain N1-methylpseudouridine. And according to an article published in the journal Neurobiology of Disease, the spike proteins contained in the vaccines can trigger a pro-inflammatory response in brain endothelial cells and damage vascular endothelial cells.
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Mercura Wang is a health reporter for The Epoch Times. Have a tip? Email her at: mercura.w@epochtimes.nyc
