Young students’ lifestyle as a health risk factor during the COVID-19 pandemic under various anti-epidemic strategies

Various strategies have been implemented to prevent the COVID-19 spread both in Russia (self-isolation) and in Belarus (restrictive measures). They can be considered an unordinary stress-inducing situation that involves drastic changes in a lifestyle. Our research goal was to analyze students’ attitudes towards basic lifestyle components in both countries under various anti-epidemic strategies. We interviewed 876 students from Krasnoyarsk who were self-isolated for 2.5 months and 1140 students from Grodno who did not face strict quarantine restrictions. We performed comparative assessment of changes in basic lifestyle components that occurred during the pandemic. We established certain changes in subjective health self-assessment (more than a half of the students described it as bad), emotional state (subjective comfort index was between its acceptable level and a trend towards its deterioration). Acute deficiency of usual physical activity was mentioned by 35.4 % of the respondents from Krasnoyarsk and 29.5 % of their counterparts from Grodno (p function show_eabstract() { $('#eabstract1').hide(); $('#eabstract2').show(); $('#eabstract_expand').hide(); }