A doctor at Queen’s Hospital offers some self-care advice for people with Covid-19 to help prevent pneumonia developing. The bottom line is that you need to keep your lungs working as well as they can.
1. Sit up, take a deep breath, hold it for five seconds. Do this five times and on the fifth breath, have a good cough into a tissue or cloth and safely bin it. Repeat this whole procedure. This will all help expel fluid/mucus from the lungs.
2. Lie on your stomach and breath fairly deeply for ten minutes. The main mass of your lungs is actually closer to your back than the front of your chest so this presumably allows them to fill even more efficiently than they do when you’re supine. The exercises will keep up the strength in your breathing muscles.
3. Repeat instructions 1 and 2 regularly.
Breathing exercises and posture are important generally. So, it is perhaps worth doing these exercises regardless of whether you have Covid-19 or not.