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M. Morikawa1, Y. Urabe1, K. Fukui1, N. Maeda1
1Graduate School of Biomedical and Health Sciences, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan
Background: Novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) spread worldwide and 17,864 people were infected in Japan as of June 21, 2020. A state of emergency was declared from April 16 to May 25, 2020 and people were "strongly requested to refrain from going out unnecessarily and thoroughly reduce contact with others." Due to the pandemic, educational institutions were also required to take precautionary measures, such as temporary school closures and conducting remote classes. In the previous surveys in Bangladesh and Italy (Khan et al., 2020; Gallè et al., 2020), where educational institutions are temporarily closed, decreased physical activity among students was associated with stress, anxiety, and depression. Walking is an effective type of physical activity that promotes health. So that, the walking steps taken by students may be decreasing in Japan as well. The number of steps taken by new students, who had not reached the average number of steps taken by Japanese people even before the outbreak of COVID-19 (Urabe et al., 2019), is particularly concerning.
Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the number of steps of students from January to May 2020.
Methods: The university students used their smartphones to enter the daily steps from January to May. Furthermore, the participants about their exercise habits before and during the state of emergency were asked to distinguish participants who maintained, increased, or decreased their exercise habits. Two groups, new and old student groups, were established for statistical analysis. To compare the daily steps in new and old student group, multiple comparisons by the Bonferroni method were performed. Furthermore, to compare the number of steps in each month between groups, an unpaired t-test or Mann–Whitney U test was performed according to the normality. To examine the differences in exercise habits between groups, we performed a chi-square test and residual analysis. All statistical analyses were performed for males and females. The significance level was at 5%.
Results: A total of 236 individuals were finally selected as participants. The number of steps taken by all students was 5,088±2,338 steps/day in January, 5,257±2,490 steps/day in February, 5,192±2,322 steps/day in March, 3,340±1,685 steps/day in April, and 2,866±1,656 steps/day in May. In female, the number of steps in May was significantly lower in the new student group than old student group (p<0.05). Comparisons of changes in exercise habits showed that the percentage of "decrease" was the highest in both new student group and old student group, but "increase" was lower in new students than in old students for females (p<0.05).
Conclusion(s): Since number of steps of all students decreased due to the novel coronavirus disease, whether the number of steps will recover in the future must continue to be observed. Notably, female new students did not actively increase their exercise habits during the state of emergency and their number of steps decreased significantly compared to old students.
Implications: Health promotion would be needed among the students, especially for the female new student than that of old student.
Funding, acknowledgements: None
Keywords: physical activity, women, Japan
Topic: COVID-19
Did this work require ethics approval? Yes
Institution: Graduate School of Biomedical and Health Sciences, Hiroshima University
Committee: Ethical Committee for Epidemiology of Hiroshima University
Ethics number: E-2109
All authors, affiliations and abstracts have been published as submitted.
