Muscle for Life

Over the past few weeks, you’ve been bombarded with contradictory, confusing, and complex facts and figures about COVID-19. At this point, the story most often repeated in the media goes like this: Aside from social distancing, washing your hands, and (maybe) wearing a face mask, there’s nothing you can do to avoid getting COVID-19. If you do get COVID-19, there’s nothing you can do to hasten your recovery or reduce the severity of your symptoms except wait for your body to get rid of the virus. If you’re one of the unlucky few who develops severe symptoms like respiratory failure, the best doctors can do for you is put you on a ventilator, give you some drugs to ease your discomfort, and hope for the best. While this story is more right than wrong based on the available evidence, it paints a grim, overly simplistic picture. Here’s how Dr. Zhen Yan, the director of the Center for Skeletal Muscle Research at the University of Virginia’s Robert M. Berne Cardiovascular Research Center, puts it: “All you hea