A tale of two stories: COVID-19 and disability. A critical scoping review of the literature on the effects of the pandemic among athletes with disabilities and para-athletes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted athletes, and, in particular, para-athletes and athletes with disabilities. However, there is no scholarly appraisal on this topic. Therefore, a critical scoping review of the literature was conducted. We were able to retrieve sixteen relevant studies. The sample size ranged from 4 to 183. Most studies were observational, cross-sectional, and questionnaire-based surveys, two studies were interventional, and two were longitudinal. One study was a technical feasibility study. Almost all studies were conducted as single-country studies, with the exception of one multi-country investigation. Five major topics/themes could be identified: namely, 1) impact of COVID-19-induced confinement on training and lifestyles in athletes with disabilities/para-athletes; 2) impact of COVID-19-induced confinement on mental health in athletes with disabilities/para-athletes; 3) impact of COVID-19-induced confinement on performance outcomes in athletes with disabilities/para-athletes; 4) risk of contracting COVID-19 among athletes with disabilities/para-athletes; and, finally, 5) impact of COVID-19 infection on athletes with disabilities/para-athletes. The scholarly literature assessed was highly heterogeneous, with contrasting findings, and various methodological limitations. Based on our considerations, we recommend that standardized, reliable tools should be utilized and new, specific questionnaires should be created, tested for reliability, and validated. High-quality, multi-center, cross-countries, longitudinal surveys should be conducted to overcome current shortcomings. Involving all relevant actors and stakeholders, including various national and international Paralympic Committees, as a few studies have done, is fundamental: community-led, participatory research can help identify gaps in the current knowledge about sports-related practices among the population of athletes with disabilities during an unprecedented period of measures undertaken that have significantly affected everyday life. Moreover, this could advance the field, by capturing the needs of para-athletes and athletes with disabilities and enabling the design of a truly "disability-inclusive response" to COVID-19 and similar future conditions/situations. Furthermore, follow-up studies on COVID-19-infected para-athletes and athletes with disabilities should be conducted. Evidence of long-term effects of COVID-19 is available only for able-bodied athletes, for whom cardiorespiratory residual alterations and mental health issues a long time after COVID-19 have been described.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.037 | 0.121 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".