Corona vs. competitive sports

Corona has been on our minds for years now. What impact have recent measures had on competitive sports? What is the connection between sporting activity and a supposed course of disease?
Prof. Dr. Bernd Wolfarth, President DGSP and head of the Institute for Sports Medicine at the Charité in Berlin. in an interview:

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What impact does the pandemic have on competitive sport?

Prof. Dr. Bernd Wolfarth: Of course, we have now experienced this in many different ways in competitive sports. Perhaps the most memorable experience was the postponement of the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. But we in German sports have also been affected, of course. Competitive sports had major problems in March, April, and May 2020 because it was simply a phase of finding one's bearings, because things suddenly stopped working. There was the lockdown at the end of March/beginning of April 2020 and then we had to develop many things. For example, we worked with the German Society for Sports Medicine and Preventionof which I am also president, we also initiated various guidelines. Our Science Council was very active in this. Professional sports slowly reconstituted themselves around May 2020. Soccer has certainly made some progress in this respect, and concepts have been developed that make it possible to play sports safely again.

Do you feel this at your institute as well?

Prof. Dr. Bernd Wolfarth: In our department alone, we have certainly performed several thousand PCR tests in conjunction with sports. All in all, I believe that competitive sports have come through the crisis relatively well.

So the pandemic is not that bad for competitive sport?

Prof. Dr. Bernd Wolfarth: But what is a very, very big problem for us in sports is, of course, that the entire mass sport, that club sport has suffered massively. And that is something that, on the one hand, naturally also falls on our feet in competitive sports, because young talent simply disappears over a certain period of time, because clubs stand still for a longer period of time, and perhaps some clubs also dissolve or are not always able to regenerate properly afterwards. In other words, we certainly have a problem with young talent in competitive sports. But of course we also have a massive medical problem. In other words, we see in many areas that, simply because of the pandemic, many offers for physical activity, for example, have been significantly reduced. Children and adolescents are particularly susceptible to this, both from the physical side and from the psychological side. We know that overall significant weight gain has occurred in all age ranges as a result of the pandemic. Of course, we are also concerned that the lack of exercise and physical inactivity will have medium- and long-term consequences that we may not yet be able to assess, but which will cause us greater medical problems in 5, 10 or 20 years with all these diseases that are dependent on lack of exercise, major diseases of civilization, which may then occur more frequently: Starting with obesity, through diabetes, to arterial hypertension.

Do you encounter Long COVID in competitive sport?

Prof. Dr. Bernd Wolfarth: Long COVID is indeed a problem. Of course, we also have many COVID-19 infections in sports. In our department alone, we have already performed over 500 post COVID examinations. We can roughly say that the clientele that we often see here, i.e. a clientele oriented towards competitive sports, generally have fewer problems with the disease, because we know that the fit, the young, those without concomitant diseases, naturally deal with this viral disease much better than someone who is older, who has previous diseases, who perhaps has risk factors, such as obesity, i.e. a very strong overweight, or other problems. What we actually see in individual cases, also with the young, are prolonged infections. If it is simply not over after 10 to 14 days, but that someone still has symptoms after two, three, four weeks. Some of these are rather unproblematic symptom constellations, e.g. the sense of smell or taste does not return for a longer period of time. However, there are of course cases where there is increased fatigue, where there can also be a fatigue syndrome, i.e. a chronic fatigue syndrome, and that is then ultimately also in the direction of long COVID manifestation.

So there really is a connection here: the more sport I do, the less likely I am to have a severe course?

Prof. Dr. Bernd Wolfarth: You can definitely say that. The data is actually quite clear. We see moderate courses in those who are very physically active and physically fit, who have hardly any risk factor profile, and we very rarely see only severe courses or even long-term courses.

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