The world is in the throes of a public health crisis. But the implications are more far reaching than navigating a pandemic or a new normal. COVID-19 is a global wake-up call to improve our health, and the evidence lies in what is understood about COVID-19 so far.

Factor 1: Exposure

Two primary factors, taken individually and together, compound the severity of a COVID-19 infection — what concerns us most — since the majority of infections do not result in illness or death.

The first factor is exposure — heavy exposure — even if you are healthy, and especially if you’re unprotected. No matter how strong your immune system or how routinely you wash your hands, it appears that the human body is not equipped to battle a deluge of the novel coronavirus.

Heavy exposure was the reason for the high infection rate among Chinese healthcare workers early on who, unaware of the outbreak, were not properly protected with personal protective equipment (PPE). Heavy exposure is what led to Italy’s sharp spikes following premature relaxation of quarantine restrictions and New York City’s rapid transmission in a densely populated city. Heavy exposure has endangered healthcare workers on the frontlines in the United States and around the world who are enduring extreme distress due to the short supply of PPE.

The measures that have been put in place — lockdown, social distancing, self-quarantine, wearing masks, and testing — have been critical in reducing exposure in general, but especially heavy exposure.

Factor 2: A Weak Immune System

The second factor that appears to compound the severity of a COVID-19 infection is a weak immune system. The body’s immune system is tasked with fighting invaders like the coronavirus and other viruses, bacteria, and even cancer cells. The stronger your immune system, the better your chance of fighting invaders.

According to the CDC, two of the most at-risk, immune-compromised populations are:

• People age 65 and older, because they tend to have a weaker immune system.

• People of all ages with underlying medical conditions, particularly if not well controlled, because their immune systems are compromised by their conditions.

A key idea is that the human body shares and distributes its resources for required functioning. In a healthy individual, all of the body’s resources are used for basic body functioning. In an individual with an underlying medical condition, the body’s resources are shared between basic body functioning and the medical condition; add COVID-19, and the body’s resources are shared among basic body functioning, the medical condition, and fighting COVID-19. It is easy to understand why it would be difficult to fight COVID-19. In people 65 and older, the quality of their body’s resources may be insufficient — including their immune system — and they may be suffering from one or more chronic diseases. People living in a nursing home or long-term-care facility have been found to be at further risk due to exposure.

Accounting for the Anomalies

But what about the anomalies? We’ve heard reports of young, healthy individuals without an underlying illness — including teenagers and even infants — becoming severely ill. Some have died. Why is this happening? Here are a few points for consideration.

First, we need a clearer definition of what it means to be healthy. There isn’t a precise, complete set of markers that accurately define health. For example, not long before I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was given a clean bill of health. My blood work indicated that I had low blood sugar and low cholesterol. I was not at risk for heart disease, and I did not have cancer. However, routine blood tests do not detect cancer — though they can provide clues. I will never know whether I had cancer at the time, but when I was later diagnosed with cancer, I could only conclude that my immune system wasn’t strong enough to fight it. I wasn’t healthy.

Second, we may not know whether we have an underlying problem. A study conducted by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine “provides strong evidence that malignant tumors may grow undetected in the body for years before they can be detected by blood tests.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says “more than 88 million US adults — over a third — have prediabetes, and more than 84% of them don’t know they have it.” And according to studies in the U.S. and in the U.K.,many obese people do not know they are obese, in part because of self-perceptions but also because of discrepancies in measurement tools, such as body mass index (BMI), that define obesity and health risk.

In short, “healthy individuals without an underlying condition” may, in fact, be unhealthy and have an underlying condition.

Lifestyle as a Factor

A third point to consider is the impact of lifestyle. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, “Chronic diseases — including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer — account for some of the most common health problems in the United States. Yet many of these chronic diseases are preventable, as they’re linked to poor diet and lifestyle choices including tobacco use, excessive alcohol consumption, and inadequate physical activity.”

Stress alone is estimated as a factor in as much as 90% of illness. Stress is a matter of “mind over matter.” Through brain scans, neuroscientists can show that, within a fraction of a second, thinking of a single negative word stimulates specific regions of the brain to trigger the production of stress chemicals. And yet this was how the stress response was designed to work. “Fight or flight” primes the body with stress chemicals to facilitate quick, short-lived physical activity in response to danger. However, today’s stress is mostly mental — and chronic. The danger with stress is not stress itself, but with the repeated stress-response triggering that isn’t responded to physically, resulting in stress chemicals not clearing, accumulating, and breaking down in the body. Over time, sustained, chronic stress combined with being sedentary degrades the immune system and health. Despite the recognized hazards of stress, it is slippery to address; stress is difficult to diagnose clinically and treatment is not often prioritized with the warranted urgency.

Stress itself is a pandemic, whether due to diminished living standards in the U.S., job scarcity in Europe, poverty in developing nations, or living under oppressive government rule in Asia — before COVID-19.

Also impactful — and perhaps more impactful than conscious, mental stress — is unconscious, emotional stress, the result of burying painful feelings.

Everyone buries painful feelings from time to time; it is more common than you think. We do it automatically and without awareness. We do it for survival, putting aside painful feelings to get through the day. It begins in childhood, when we do not understand how to process our feelings. In cases of trauma and abuse, it can become a way of life.

What is buried in the subconscious mind differs from one person to the next and represents a collection of reactions to life experiences shaped by factors such as personality, childhood development, emotional support systems, belief systems, and the nature of the life experiences themselves, forming a foundation for mental health that, if not addressed — moment by moment, unconscious, painful thoughts bubbling up and triggering the stress response — can lead to mild to severe forms of mental illness and possibly addiction, in addition to affecting the state of one’s health. “Unconscious” mind over matter.

Stress can also be physical, resulting from surgery, overexertion, and overexposure to the elements, or in occupational settings. Even undernutrition and living in cramped quarters can create sustained, stressful tension in the body.

Essentially, stress is triggered by any factor that causes the body to function counter to its inherent design, a design that served our hunter and gatherer ancestors living in a primitive world, as compared with today’s fast-paced living in the modern world.

Stress could be the single most overriding factor contributing to the COVID-19 anomalies around the world.

Other lifestyle factors also critically affect immune-system functioning and the body’s other virus-fighting mechanisms. Our bodies depend on us to provide them with seven essentials.

1. Food nutrients. Plentiful, superior-quality food nutrients are the ingredients for generating ample, robust white blood cells and other helpers that power immune-system functioning.

2. Water. Copious hydration ensures the body’s trillions of cells can carry out some 100,000 metabolic activities per second — including fighting an onslaught of the coronavirus.

3. Raising heart rate. Doing activities that raise the heart rate — riding a bike, raking leaves, climbing stairs — clears stress chemicals that would otherwise weaken the immune system.

4. Restful sleep. Not demanding more from our bodies than they can give — rest — gives the immune system the time, energy, and resources to fight invaders and rebuild defenses.

5. Oxygen. Abundant oxygen in fresh air combines with water in cellular metabolism to stop viruses from invading cells, where they take up residence and replicate.

6. Clearing waste. Clearing digestive waste daily (a bowel movement) opens a pathway through which viral cellular metabolic waste can be decluttered and quickly leave the body.

7. De-stressing. Taking steps to relax and uplift yourself stimulates the body to produce the immune-enhancing neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine.

These seven essentials are required for all body functioning, and together comprise the foundation for a healthy lifestyle and good health. More on this shortly.

Black and Latinx Americans have been identified as two additional at-risk COVID-19 populations. The New York Times Editorial Board stated that “Across the United States, Black and Hispanic people suffer disproportionately from poverty, poor health care and chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension and asthma.” Native Americans similarly struggle. Socioeconomic factors most certainly influence lifestyle factors that directly affect immune-system sufficiency and overall health. Low income alone is correlated with poor diet, increased stress, and poor health care. (Further complicating poor health care for Black and Latinx Americans are disparities in preventive services for people age 65 and older and younger people, alike. Note: Preventive services aim to detect and treat chronic diseases in the early stages but do not solve the problem of preventing chronic disease altogether in any population.) Black and Latinx people are also at greater risk for COVID-19 due to heavy exposure, as they are highly represented in service-based jobs that require direct, constant contact with the public.

COVID-19 is causing more than respiratory problems that doctors and scientists find puzzling: Patients in their 30s and 40s, barely sick with COVID-19, are dying from stroke, developing red and purple “COVID toe” rashes, and exhibiting brain inflammation and even heart infection — even COVID-19 reinfection. One underlying commonality appears to be blood clotting. Researchers have not yet determined whether it is the virus is directly attacking unhealthy blood vessels or if the immune system is rapidly firing back against an attack either because it is overwhelmed or malfunctioning due to unhealthiness. Other non-coronavirus, lifestyle-related reasons, such as if an individual is overweight, has hypertension or diabetes, or is older, may contribute to the many strange symptoms in COVID-19 patients. As scientists continue to research, they may discover that blood clotting — or COVID-19 itself — is a catchall for revealing frailties and vulnerabilities in unhealthy bodies.

The virus may be the culprit, but it may also be a catalyst for unveiling evidence of poor health.

This point is worthy of prudent consideration at this juncture — a half year into COVID-19, with at least a year to go — because it raises the prospect of launching a public health initiative to improve health as an added measure in managing the pandemic, especially when assessing what has already transpired and what is yet to come.

The Big Picture

In just a few short months the pandemic has set in motion unprecedented suffering. Global economic suffering — in shattered personal finances, shuttered businesses, and stock market volatility. Emotional suffering — in the rise of anxiety, depression, suicide, and trauma. Domestic suffering — in increased domestic violence and divorce. Basic living suffering — living in isolation from lockdown and other measures that were designed to safeguard us. Leisure activities, such as sports, entertainment, travel, and even dining out at restaurants seem like luxuries relegated for the future, at best.

All of this is increasing stress and weakening immune-system functioning.

One concern that cannot be overstated is the impact of the pandemic on the world’s youth. The development of the planet’s entire future generations has been interrupted by changes in schooling, home life, socialization, and living in an uncertain world. The new normal is not just different — it’s not conducive to developmental growth. Emotional collateral damage is inevitable — adding to existing difficulties. The United States, for example, is already suffering from grave mental health crises expressed in bullying, suicide, and mass shootings. Yet anxiety and depression are serious problems on their own.

As an example, I once helped a 32-year-old woman overcome severe anxiety she was experiencing during a job search. We traced it to trauma she’d had as a 5-year-old growing up in 1980s New York City when the AIDS epidemic broke out. Although she felt safe at home with her parents, she internalized, Who will take care of me? and panic from frightening incidents she experienced outside her home, along with the sudden loss of some loved ones. It created within her a pattern of fear, anxiety, and helplessness that repeated throughout her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood whenever she was faced with matters of “survival” — such as searching for a job.

And what about adults, trying to cope in an upended world with never-before-seen circumstances that are out of our control? No one asked for COVID-19 to happen. The stress and fear of returning to a job and facing a risk of infection … or of not returning to work and losing a job … of not yet receiving unemployment … of bills piling up without an income … of losing a home. The stress and fear of at-risk loved ones or yourself getting sick and dying … of unknowingly, asymptomatically transmitting the virus to loved ones or neighbors … of interacting with people who aren’t following measures … of government officials unquestionably placing a higher priority on the economy over the welfare of citizens.

As conspiracy theorists challenge the truth and breadth of the pandemic, what cannot be overlooked is hospitals around the world pushed beyond capacity with record numbers of people sick and dying. COVID-19 is real. And it is worse than the flu. Even if data has been misrepresented or isolation measures have gone too far — though that’s unlikely, given the presumed high number of asymptomatic infections that could have increased transmission in the absence of lockdowns — what cannot be ignored is that a contagious, deadly virus is continuing to circulate in our world. We have yet to finish riding out this storm.

It does not take the mind of an epidemiologist, economist, or sociologist to understand that continued vigilance in some form is required in the foreseeable future if we wish to avert additional waves, a harsh and lasting economic result, or more socially impacting consequences. COVID-19 began with a single infection that rapidly spread around the world. If it happened once, it can happen again.

Even with the world’s recent lesson in flattening the curve. South Korea’s patient 31 example traces the details of how just one infected person, within a few days, by not getting tested early, social distancing, or self-quarantining in a country that was otherwise following tightly controlled measures, initiated cluster infections. In a world with 7.8 billion people, where needs and consensus are nonuniform across local, national, and international territories — with a sprinkling of human nature, irrespective of regional and cultural differences — we are likely to be besieged by setbacks and new spikes before all is said and done. As of June 2020, cases have increased in many states in the U.S., reversing initial non-mandating of wearing masks and social distancing. K-12 schools reopening have posed the next big challenge and potential major setback as much of the country’s youth is returned to daily exposure with the risk of spread among families, teachers, and school staff.

South Korea can also provide an example of the consequences of repeat occurrences. Having survived an attack of MERS-CoV in 2015, the country was prepared to manage COVID-19 successfully, and it did. Still, the country has lost substantial tourism revenues. Despite its preparedness, an economic setback could not be averted, with the trickle-down effect impacting livelihoods and no doubt increasing stress.

Even if we were to return to more normal times in the coming months, the experts say we are not out of the woods yet. The northern hemisphere has not experienced a summer reprieve as hoped by spending more time outdoors — which is in line with the southern hemisphere’s warmer, summer temperatures not halting transmission early on. We cannot afford to become complacent or lax because, if we listen to the experts this time, another wave is predicted this winter, alongside the flu. In short, things stand to get worse.

In the meantime, as we wait for the delivery of a vaccine projected to arrive in a year or so, potentially helping us feel safe and see life return to normal, I cannot help but wonder, What if this were to happen again? Or, worse, any number of times? Less widespread pandemics are fairly recent: SARS broke out in 2003 and was contained by 2004. The 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was the largest since the virus was first discovered in 1976. MERS, first reported in 2012, peaked in 2014 and has reported cases in 2020. With COVID-19 and each new pandemic, is our only course of action to take steps to flatten the curve, phase in the new normal, and wait for a vaccine? We would have no choice, but would we want to have to do that? At present, we are weary of lockdown. And with the race to develop a vaccine, can we be guaranteed of their safety and efficacy? Can we make good decisions when antibody tests are unreliable and our understanding of COVID-19 immunity, though emerging, is still incomplete? In short, do we always have to be at the mercy of COVID-19 and future viral threats?

Although we cannot predict the future, what information we can rely on at this time is that, while a COVID-19 infection can be severe or deadly, in most cases it is not. Heavy exposure aside, the severity of a COVID-19 infection depends, at the very least, on the strength of one’s immune system, and more likely, on the state of one’s health. To help fight COVID-19, an additional, integral part of the solution requires strengthening the body’s immune system — individually, to protect oneself, and collectively, as an added measure to help fight COVID-19 together — with the beneficial side effect of accomplishing what has been needed worldwide for a long time: good health.

What Can We Do Right Away?

There are safe and simple ways to strengthen the immune system right away.

It begins with providing the body with the seven essentials. However, in these difficult times, people are struggling to eat right, exercise, and manage stress. A gentle approach that focuses on doing what is simplest, easiest, most accessible, least expensive, and most impactful may be more suitable and produce the best results for the broader population. Some of the following may seem unconventional, but they produce very powerful health benefits.

• Frequently do physical activities that raise your heart rate and work up a sweat, and that you love to do. This is critical. If choosing only one thing to do, do this. It is the only way to clear stress chemicals triggered by the stress response that, if not cleared, can be damaging over time. This is the simplest and most direct way of mitigating stress. Dance at home, ride your bike, shoot hoops, do jumps and kicks to music — do anything that you truly enjoy doing so that you’ll do it consistently, willingly, and with joy. The other major benefit is that it will directly invoke the other essentials, which include helping you eat and sleep better, breathe in more oxygen, eliminate waste, improve mood, and sharpen cognition.

• Regularly eat foods with antimicrobial properties that you enjoy eating. This is the second most important thing to do. Eating foods that kill other viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites frees the immune system to focus on fighting COVID-19, should you become infected. Every day, eat one or more of the following that you enjoy eating: garlic, onions, ginger, healthy salt (Himalayan pink salt, not processed table salt), coconut oil (it is not yet confirmed but scientists in the Philippines are researching coconut oil as a treatment for COVID-19), and herbs and spices, such as clove, oregano, thyme, cinnamon, and cumin.

• Take a high quality multivitamin and multimineral supplement. This is the third most important thing to do. To help make up for nutritional deficiencies.

• Laugh a lot, until you cry. Watch comedies with friends and loved ones. It relieves stress and triggers the production of dopamine, making you feel happy.

• Give out big, heartfelt hugs. Hug pets and loved ones, following social-distancing guidelines. Show kindness and be loving. It relieves stress by producing beneficial neurotransmitters that make you feel good.

• Engage with anyone and do anything that makes you feel exceptionally peaceful, happy, uplifted, excited, and loved. To relieve stress, for emotional support, to help you stay positive, to know you are loved, to hold your interest, and to maintain high spirits.

• Be silly and feel free. In these difficult times of uncertainty, unprecedented stress, and not feeling in control, doing unstructured, unrestrained, positive activities that counter the seriousness and helplessness of the situation can help to relieve stress. Wildly singing and dancing. Coloring — inside and outside the lines. Writing freeform prose. Experimenting plunking on musical instruments or found objects to produce sounds. Randomly putting together found objects in a sculpture or a collage. Skipping. Even having a playful pillow fight accompanied by a lot of laughter. Some friends who got caught in the rain in Central Park laughed it off and continued walking instead of running for shelter — and were invigorated!

• Spend time in nature. To relieve stress. The air is fresh and clean, the sights and sounds are uplifting, and it’s relaxing. Whether it’s spending time in the mountains, the seas, or a fish pond or flower garden in your backyard.

• Listen to music that really moves you. It relieves stress by stimulating the production of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine. Your body produces more dopamine during the moments in which you’re most excited and also when you anticipate those moments.

• Rest. Listen to your body and respect what it’s saying. Rest when you need it.

The overall idea is to focus on doing what is positive and uplifting, which simultaneously screens out what is negative and dispiriting.

Also, try your best to do any of the following as much as possible, even if it’s a little. Every bit counts.

• Eat high-quality food and avoid processed food. To obtain the most and best-quality food nutrients.

• Drink more water. Especially when you’re thirsty — to stay hydrated.

• Eat more fiber in vegetables and fruit and drink more water. The combination of sufficient water and fiber ensures a daily, effortless bowel movement.

• Avoid or minimize drinking coffee, soda, and alcoholic beverages. These beverages are dehydrating.

• Avoid or minimize sugar consumption as much as possible. Both healthy and unhealthy forms: white table sugar, candy, desserts, agave, coconut sugar, raw honey, raw cane sugar, dried fruit, maple syrup, fruit juices, and sugary smoothies and vegetable juices. Though healthy forms contain potent and powerful nutrients, sugar paralyzes the immune system within 10 minutes of ingestion for up to five hours. Frequent sugar consumption can unwittingly thwart the immune system’s response at the beginning of a COVID-19 infection.

• Avoid or minimize cigarette and marijuana smoking. Both damage and irritate the lungs, compounding the respiratory symptoms of a COVID-19 infection.

These are a few highlights. Following these guidelines can powerfully strengthen the immune system and mitigate a COVID-19 infection — and possibly build antibodies to help prevent a reinfection — while improving overall health.

What Can We Do in the Long Run?

Building a strong immune system is an important first step in helping prevent a severe COVID-19 infection and improving health. As mentioned earlier, the seven essentials are important for body functioning, and together comprise the foundation for a healthy lifestyle and good health.

Food nutrients obtained from organic food provide the ingredients for all the body’s components — blood, cells, organs, bones, proteins, fatty acids, and so on. An abundantly hydrated body keeps water inside cells, instead of moving water to where it is needed more in a dehydrated body, compromising cells. Raising heart rate normalizes hormones that tell us when to eat and stop eating, sleep and stop sleeping, preventing overeating and weight gain. Restful sleep provides the body with sufficient time to complete its nightly maintenance, repair, and regeneration, some of which can only be completed during sleep. Taking a few deep breaths in times of stress provides the body with essential oxygen that might be lower with stressful, shallow breathing. Clearing waste signals the body’s cells to send all of their waste to the bowel that would otherwise stagnate and toxify. De-stressing the subconscious mind — through therapy, journaling, and other techniques that uncover buried painful feelings — relieves the body of a constant assault of unconscious stress.

The converse creates a foundation for an unhealthy lifestyle and poor health.

Processed food, fast food, and junk food, stripped of vital food nutrients with added, sometimes harmful, substances, provide lesser quality ingredients for the body’s components. Regularly drinking the most common beverages — coffee, soda, and alcohol — and not drinking enough water is dehydrating. Infrequently raising heart rate inhibits the production of new brain cells and the youthfulness neurotransmitter, human growth hormone. Insufficient restful sleep over time builds up into an irreversible sleep deficit. Nicotine in cigarette smoke reduces the amount of oxygen circulating in the bloodstream and reaching cells. Irregular waste clearing due to low dietary fiber and hydration causes painful constipation that strands waste in the body and can toxify. Not adequately de-stressing the subconscious mind can develop into anxiety, depression, substance abuse, obsessive compulsive disorder, and paranoia.

The effect of lifestyle on health is so significant that it is central to the disciplines of Western medicine’s cousins, integrative medicine (which uses effective interventions that are natural and less invasive whenever possible) and functional medicine (which takes a systems, not symptomatic, approach to diagnosing disease). Lifestyle is also central to emerging programs that treat chronic diseases. For example, Dale Bredesen, MD, internationally recognized for his research and work in treating cognitive disorders, has shown that Alzheimer’s disease and dementia can be halted and sometimes reversed using a protocol of lifestyle and nutritional interventions.

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg in our understanding of the benefits of a healthy lifestyle.

The Extraordinary Benefits of a Healthy Lifestyle

Recent scientific discoveries are revealing bigger, broader, more encompassing benefits of a healthy lifestyle. In short, the body, when unimpeded by a constant barrage of unhealthy lifestyle factors, can tap into other, built-in regenerative mechanisms that allow it to function optimally. Two such discoveries are adult stem cells and epigenetics.

Stem cell scientist and expert Christian Drapeau says of adult stem cells:

Stem cells are cells with the unique ability to multiply endlessly … and to transform themselves into cells of other tissues. No other cell type in the body has this ability …. As far as treatments are concerned, the future of stem cell research lies in the potential of adult stem cells, present in the body after birth …. [They] constitute the natural repair system of the body …. [But] supporting the natural role of your own stem cells in your own body may be the best strategy to enjoy optimal health …. It is striking to discover that many things we know to be healthy actually have a beneficial effect on stem cells, while many things that we know to be unhealthy have a deleterious effect on stem cell function. For example, intense physical activity increases the number of circulating stem cells …. Stress reduces the ability of stem cells to migrate in tissues and proliferate, and so does cigarette smoke …. In fact, the more we look at this whole phenomenon, the more it appears that we are looking at one of the main fundamentals of human health; supporting the natural function of stem cells in the body supports the natural ability of the body to repair and stay healthy.

Epigenetics is a field of biology that is uncovering how our lifestyle can trigger a potential for disease — or not. According to epigenetics, our body places gene markers on top of our genes (“epi” means “on top of”), turning them on or off, turning the potential for a disease on or off. Which gene markers your body lays down depends upon your lifestyle. Studies show that identical twins, born with the same set of genes, develop different health problems based upon their individual lifestyles. Epigenetic markers can be passed to our offspring and future generations. With that potential plus our own lifestyle, which is learned and adopted from our parents, it is no wonder that diseases continue to run in families.

With what is understood about stem cells and epigenetics alone, there is good reason to forge ahead with the initiative of improving health individually, and to help fight COVID-19 together.

Taking a Fresh Approach

The steps for improving health or adopting a healthy lifestyle, getting healthy, changing lifestyle, prevention — they are all one and the same, as they produce the same end result — can be achieved by taking a fresh approach. In devising a viable course of action, two factors must be accounted for:

• Modern-day living is demanding.

• Most people do not or cannot prioritize their health.

In short, improving health requires education that simplifies health and makes it practical, accessible, affordable — and most of all, enjoyable, so people will stay with it — thereby empowering and motivating people to take charge of their health, either on their own or through a support system. The guidelines presented in this article can serve as a start.

The ripple effect of improved health would help address another major area of concern: health costs. It stands to reason that improved health in increasingly larger populations where fewer patients are heavily dependent upon medical systems would help shrink costs and reduce insurance rates, incurring savings to businesses and governments providing coverage, and ideally lay the foundation for expanded insurance coverage — full coverage — without copays, deductibles, or screening for preexisting conditions.

It is interesting to note that some of the measures that were employed during lockdown have reduced stress and increased emotional well-being for many, having a positive effect on health. One impactful example is telecommuting — by reducing the stress of commuting to work, especially in high-traffic cities, and increasing emotional well-being working away from the stress of the office. Social distancing and wearing masks have increased the awareness of our actions on the lives of others, generating more courtesy and consideration for others. And healthcare workers and essential workers have been receiving the recognition, respect, and gratitude that they rightly deserve working on the front lines. We are shifting our values.

Telecommuting has also helped to improve the environment, further benefitting health. Reducing smog and emissions, as in Los Angeles, has improved air quality for healthier breathing. New York City was quieter during lockdown; noise pollution is bad for your health. And the water in the Venice Canals became cleaner and less polluted. In essence, the planet was given a break from global warming and further decline, demonstrating that there is still time to make changes that can produce dramatic environmental and health improvements.

These are but a few examples.

In summary, as areas of the world reopen, the phase-in steps appear to be pointing in the direction of returning to the basics in living. COVID-19 could become a 21st century symbol for showing the inhabitants of planet Earth how far out of balance we have been living with our bodies, in our lives, and in our world — and give us an opportunity to turn things around.

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The Simple Seven © Marlene Veltre 2016+ All rights reserved.

The information in this post is to be used for educational purposes only. It is not intended to serve as a substitute for professional medical advice or to prevent, cure, or heal any illness or disease. You should always see your doctor or health practitioner.

No portion of this post may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including recording or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of Marlene Veltre.