YourUnderstanding Health C VID Voice of the GP
There are no vitamins or supplements that you can take, which are going to help you reduce your risk of getting COVID, nor of any other virus for that matter. It’s just general health.
Editor Michael Walls sat down with Western Sydney GP, Dr Kean-Seng Lim to explore some common myths and thinking around living with COVID. Michael Walls: I wanted to get a bit of a sense around immunity and COVID. I mean, what we can do to make our bodies more resilient to catching COVID or recovering. Dr Kean-Seng Lim: So that’s an interesting question that one. The bottom line is that COVID is a virus like many other viruses. So, what we would do to try to keep ourselves as healthy and as well as possible is the same as we would for any virus. This starts with our own personal health, which means healthy diet, healthy exercise, healthy weight, try not to smoke, try not to drink too much, and stay as well as possible from a general health perspective. There are no vitamins or particular supplements that you can take, which are going to help you reduce your risk of getting COVID, nor in fact, any other virus for that matter. It’s just general health. So, our best ways to prevent getting COVID are still the same ways that we’ve been talking
about all along, which is wearing masks, which would be highly recommended in any social setting, whether we’re going shopping, to school or visiting people, so wearing masks is still number one. Number two is social distancing. So, this means that when we are in the shops, we should still be watching out for that 1.5 metre distance as much as possible. Michael Walls: And what specifically of social gatherings? Dr Kean-Seng Lim: If we are having social gatherings, we can do them in an environment which has got good air flow and good air turnover, that will also reduce our risks of catching COVID. So, it’s a combination of keeping ourselves healthy, but also trying to be aware of how covid and other illnesses are spread and trying to do our best to avoid catching it, or rather trying to avoid transmitting it and catching it from these airborne masses.
Issue 01 | May 2022 | 5
