How to breathe if you have a respiratory infection like COVID-19

hi my name is Dr Jonathan bayack I'm an allergist immunologist in Massachusetts and I wanted to share with you some tips about what you might be able to do if you get sick with the coveted virus to prevent it from going into your lungs so I know a lot of us feel like we have no control and that there's nothing that we can do and actually there's a lot we can do if we wash our hands and don't touch our face and really are careful about how we're exposing ourselves to others and practicing social distancing we're going to do a lot a lot better now if you do get sick and many of us are going to get sick some people will get very mild symptoms and some people will get much worse symptoms but one of the things that you can do to try to prevent it from getting in your lungs is to is to practice breathing before you get sick and then if you do get sick there's a few things that you really need to think about doing the way our lungs work is most of it's in the back part of our torso and so when you get sick the tendency is to want to lay down lay on your back just sort of let things get better but unfortunately with this particular virus that's not good because it can get into the back parts of your lung and make your lungs weaker and weaker and more compromised so what you need to do if you do get sick is as hard as it may be is you have to move you have to get up you have to walk around you have to sit up and you got to breathe and there's some ways that you can expand your lungs and there's a lot of different techniques for it there's a lot of stuff online but I'm going to give you some examples so one of the things you can do is several times in a row take a deep deep breath in and hold it for five seconds like this and repeat that five times and at the end give a good cough not towards somebody in front of you when you're alone just a really deep cough and try to expand the air in your lungs because the bottom part of your lungs can collapse on itself it's called basil or analectasis and if the virus gets in there it's going to expand and cause more inflammation and make things accelerate much more quickly so that's really important that you do that so if I want to just reiterate breathe practice it now before you get sick so that your lungs are used to it and so deep breaths in hold it repeat that five times and then a really deep cough again not at somebody around you after that the other important thing I want everybody to remember is you got to move so if you get sick and you need to lay down that's fine but you lay on your side you got to move over you got to sit up and as much as it hurts to do the breathing stuff it's really going to make a big difference so that you don't end up in the hospital on oxygen or on a ventilator I hope that helps be well stay safe wash your hands and don't touch your face

Channel: American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology

Views: 5,117,337

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Id: sQwheE7wJZY

Length: 2min 26sec (146 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2020