HOW ZZZZs COULD BE YOUR SILENT WEAPON AGAINST CORONAVIRUS

DeFendIng ourselves and loved ones from Covid-19, the new coronavirus disease, is at the forefront of everyone’s minds right now. We’ve all heard about the importance of handwashing — but did you know that getting a good night’s sleep is also vitally important for boosting your immune system? numerous studies have shown a clear link between stress, poor sleep and vulnerability to viral infections.

You might get a coronavirus infection by inhaling particles from someone who is infected or, more likely, picking particles up on your fingers from surfaces. If you don’t wash your hands, then the next time you rub your eyes or touch your nose, the virus gets in.

The viral particles then travel to your lungs, where they infect cells. What makes them so dangerous is that they hijack the mechanism of those cells to make billions of copies of themselves. It is like a rogue robot taking over a factory and using it to produce endless identical machines before going off to conquer the world.

The race is now on between the virus, which will try to replicate as fast as possible, and your immune system, which will try to wipe it out before it can really take hold. The trouble is, if your body has never seen this sort of virus before it takes time to mount an adequate immune response. To do that it needs all the help it can get.

That is where sleep comes in. during sleep your body makes cytokines, a protein that targets viral infections, creating and co-ordinating a powerful immune response. Cytokines are produced and released during deep sleep, so it’s a double whammy if you don’t get enough.

Lack of sleep will also suppress the production of infectionfighting antibodies, which are vital for combating viruses.

A recent study has also shown that after a poor night’s sleep your killer T-cells, whose job is to bind onto cells infected by viruses and destroy them, become less effective. Lack of sleep reduces their ability to latch onto infected cells.

The impact sleep has on our ability to fight viral infections was highlighted by an extraordinary study where U.S. researchers deliberately tried to infect a large group of healthy volunteers to see how well their immune system fought back.

They asked 164 healthy men and women to wear sleep trackers and keep a record of how well they slept. Then, in a lab, they were asked to inhale droplets containing cold-inducing viruses. Afterwards, all the volunteers were kept isolated in a hotel for five days and monitored.

It turned out that those who slept less than six hours a night were four times more likely to develop a cold than those who got seven hours or more. In other words, not getting enough sleep made them hugely more vulnerable to the impact of the common cold virus, despite being exposed to the same level of infection.

In a similar study, researchers found that if your sleep efficiency (the percentage of time you spend slumbering in bed) was 90 per cent or better, then you were nearly six times less likely to develop a cold than if your sleep efficiency was low.

I’ve no doubt that a good night’s sleep is the best possible medicine for your immune system. Sleep is when the body’s defences really kick in. It’s one reason why fevers tend to rise at night, as fever is a sign that your body is fighting back. This is also the time when your body makes the necessary changes to boost your immune system to fight off infection and viruses — and recover from them, too.

healthcare workers are particularly vulnerable to Covid-19 because they get more exposure to it through treating sick people, — but also because in emergency situations they are expected to work around the clock.

In China, there were stories of medical staff wearing nappies because they didn’t have time to take a break. This is brave but very foolish.

Medical staff always bear the brunt. For example, during an outbreak of the ebola virus in 2013, which killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa, healthcare workers were unsurprisingly the most exposed.

According to the World health Organisation, they were 30 times more likely to become infected than the general population.

Again, if you look at SARS (a coronavirus infection that killed one in ten), about 20 per cent of people who got it were medics.

So do make sure you are getting enough sleep, particularly if you are a healthcare worker. We all need to do everything we can to keep our immune systems in really good shape for the challenges ahead.