Author Reply to “Letter to the Editor in Response to ‘Potential of Exercise as a COVID Prevention Strategy’”

We appreciate the positive response that Desapriya and colleagues shared regarding our study recently published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.1 We agree that physical inactivity is a major public health problem. Studies such as ours, showing the benefits of physical activity on adverse coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outcomes across demographic subgroups and common clinical conditions, should provide policy makers and public health leaders additional inducement to develop and implement effective physical activity promotions, programs, and policies. We agree with Desapriya and colleagues that there is a multitude of organizing bodies that provide strategies that should be enacted to mitigate this public health crisis. We hope that our study results can be the breaking point that leads to the enactment of these strategies to address the epidemics of chronic and infectious diseases more effectively.