Healthy School in COVID-19: Health Promotion Issues and Challenges

Dear Colleagues,

Children’s physical, mental and social health has been a worrying problem in recent decades. The COVID-19 pandemic produces extra difficulties to this problem, such as sport parks/playgrounds closing and social distancing measures. According to recent studies related to the impact of COVID-19 on children’s physical activity (PA), physical fitness (PF), and sedentary behaviors (SB), environmental restrictions have induced negative health outcomes to children’s lifestyle and daily activities including less outdoor PA time, declining PF, higher screen time, poorer sleeping, higher rate of myopia and obesity, etc.

School could be the most ideal venue to provide a safe, resourceful, and organized environment for children’s growth and development under the new normal once schools open for children’s regular activities. Some studies have been suggested to employ different forms of interventions and modern technology to support physical education and promote extracurricular school activities to tackle the pandemic barriers in children’s PA behavior. The investigation of how to promote PA and tackle challenges in school during the pandemic will have significant and long-term influence on promoting children’s PA, PF, SB, and overall health.

To provide better guidelines for health promotion and intervention research on school children’s PA, PF, and SB, it is imperative to produce a more evidence-based foundation to tackle challenges. Research based on prospective longitudinal studies, random controlled trials, meta-analyses, intervention methods, and the application of these methods on this topic are invited for this Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Patrick W. C. Lau
Dr. Jingjing Wang
Guest Editors

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