5 ms·

incorrect; smokers are shown to be substantially less susceptible to both catching covid and developing severe symptoms, a finding that has been demonstrated in

incorrect; smokers are shown to be substantially less susceptible to both catching covid and developing severe symptoms, a finding that has been demonstrated independently in (at least) france, china, and the USA: > Conclusions and relevance: Our cross sectional study in both COVID-19 out- and inpatients strongly suggests that daily smokers have a very much lower probability of developing symptomatic or severe SARS-CoV-2 infection as compared to the general population. > Very recently, the US Center of Disease Control reported an analysis of current smoker rate among US COVID-19 patients which was found to be 1.3% for the whole population of COVID-19 patients, 1% for outpatients, 2% for patients, not hospitalized in an ICU, and 1% in intensive care unit (ICU)-admitted patients https://www.qeios.com/read/WPP19W.3 https://www.qeios.com/read/WPP19W.3 in all of the mentioned countries, only about 1% of ICU cases are smokers. this has (perhaps unsurprisingly) not been widely reported.

titzer 6y ago
Maybe they just drop dead immediately in their homes? /s Seriously though, it's baffling because smoking causes so many underlying health problems that don't go well with COVID. Also, smokers have a depressed immune system compared to nonsmokers, so it would seem to suggest they'd be less likely to fight off an infection like this.
- zaarn 6y ago
  In a lot of cases, COVID-19 symptoms involve an immunesystem overreaction, which causes massive inflammation and organ damage all over, so having a depressed immunesystem might help there.
antognini 6y ago
Both SARS-Cov-2 and nicotine bind to the ACE2 receptor. One hypothesis is that because SARS-Cov-2 has to compete with nicotine for the receptor it ends up being less effective. Another hypothesis is that smokers tend to do better because of nicotine's effect of reducing inflammation.
hwillis 6y ago
Seems more likely to me they're just lying about being smokers- 60% admit to being former smokers. Inpatient hospitalizations also almost all suffer from serious comorbid conditions like hypertension or diabetes, which probably causes many to smoke less. Less so with the outpatients (<20%) but I would not be surprised if it was because unhealthy people getting sick, and those unhealthy people don't smoke because it would be bad for them.
- Supermancho 6y ago
  > Seems more likely to me they're just lying about being smokers Being a smoker has been a standard part of your medical history for a long time now for obvious reasons. There's no reason to think there is a coordinated strategy for lying about smoking in the context of a pandemic (much less revising patient medical histories, which would be the medical service industry lying). 50%+ lying about smoking in the face of potential (or actual) respiratory failure is laughable.
  - dec0dedab0de 6y ago
    Maybe they're lying on the paper work because they're afraid their insurance rates will go up.
    - shim2k 6y ago
      The studies are not being conducted in the US alone.
  - hwillis 6y ago
    The study isn't talking about history, it's talking about current smokers and many of the comments on the paper bring up concerns with how specific that is, and how many could have quit days before going to the hospital. I don't know where you got 50%+. The outpatient group was 5.3% current smokers vs expected (adjusted for age and sex) 26.9%. For inpatient it was 4.4% vs expected 17.9%. The fact that both groups had the same reported rate of current smokers (within experimental error) but very different expected rates says to me that you're only getting the people who are honest or simply incapable of quitting even while sick. Also, see this concern brought up: > Finally, and I believe this to be the most significant piece of data supporting the null hypothesis, the prevalence of never-smokers in the general population is approximately 0.75, if one subtracts the smoking incidence rate from 100. In your patient groups, non-smokers are strongly under-represented by about a factor of 2 relative to the general population, with 31% of outpatient and 32% of inpatient being labeled as never-smokers. This suggests to me that any amount of smoking actually puts one at risk for contracting COVID-19 as defined by this paper.
mytherin 6y ago
I haven't read this article in-depth, but at a glance I did not see this discussed there: can't this simply be explained by smokers generally having a lower life expectancy than non-smokers? If most people that have severe COVID complications and end up on the ICU are aged 80+, and generally smokers die before that age from smoking-related complications, doesn't it naturally follow that most people on the ICU will be non-smokers? Smoking will have killed the smokers before they become part of the high-risk group, after all.
- fab1an 6y ago
  Most of these studies correct for age because of that.
- 488643689 6y ago
  Weird sentiment to think the researchers wouldn't identify and correct for such an obvious factor.
  - mytherin 6y ago
    Correcting for something is much easier said than done, and it is very often done incorrectly. Blindly trusting researchers to do so is a mistake. Here is a quote from the abstract of the paper linked above: > Results: The inpatient group was composed of 343 patients, median age 65 yr: 206 men (601%, median age 66 years) and 137 women (39.9%, median age 65 years) with a rate of daily smokers of 4.4% (5.4% of men and 2.9% of women).The outpatient group was composed of 139 patients, median age 44 years: 62 men (44.6 %, median age 43 years, and 77 women (55.4 %, median age 44 years). The daily smokers rate was 5.3% (5.1% of men and 5.5 % of women). In the French population, the daily smokers rate was 25.4% (28.2% of men and 22.9% of women). The average daily smoker rate is taken as-is over the whole population, and compared to the smoking rate of people of age around ~66 years, despite the article itself stating that the percentage of daily smokers is lower for old people and higher for young people. So already in the abstract they have made a mistake and forgot to correct for age. I have not read the rest of the article in enough depth to judge fully, but I would absolutely not blindly trust researchers to always do this correction in an appropriate way.
lazyasciiart 6y ago
That is contradicted by the studies in the linked article >smokers with a positive Covid-19 test were more than twice as likely as non-smokers with coronavirus to be hospitalised. > This aligns with research from the US which found hospitalised smokers with coronavirus were 1.8 times more likely to die.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nyolfen 6y ago
  i don't think it is a contradiction; "a very small fraction of smokers contract covid or end up in the hospital due to it; those that do are more likely to die"
  - lazyasciiart 6y ago
    This sentence: "smokers are shown to be substantially less susceptible to both catching covid and developing severe symptoms" is contradicted by the study showing that smokers with covid are more likely to have severe symptoms than non-smokers with covid.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
lol636363 6y ago
Also in countries like India and Pakistan with very high percentage of smokers, we are seeing very low COVID19 cases. While a lot of people are skeptical of the official numbers from these countries, I think they have free media and if cases were high, we would have known.

titzer 6y ago

Maybe they just drop dead immediately in their homes? /s Seriously though, it's baffling because smoking causes so many underlying health problems that don't go well with COVID. Also, smokers have a depressed immune system compared to nonsmokers, so it would seem to suggest they'd be less likely to fight off an infection like this.

zaarn 6y ago
In a lot of cases, COVID-19 symptoms involve an immunesystem overreaction, which causes massive inflammation and organ damage all over, so having a depressed immunesystem might help there.

antognini 6y ago

Both SARS-Cov-2 and nicotine bind to the ACE2 receptor. One hypothesis is that because SARS-Cov-2 has to compete with nicotine for the receptor it ends up being less effective. Another hypothesis is that smokers tend to do better because of nicotine's effect of reducing inflammation.

hwillis 6y ago

Seems more likely to me they're just lying about being smokers- 60% admit to being former smokers. Inpatient hospitalizations also almost all suffer from serious comorbid conditions like hypertension or diabetes, which probably causes many to smoke less. Less so with the outpatients (<20%) but I would not be surprised if it was because unhealthy people getting sick, and those unhealthy people don't smoke because it would be bad for them.

Supermancho 6y ago
> Seems more likely to me they're just lying about being smokers Being a smoker has been a standard part of your medical history for a long time now for obvious reasons. There's no reason to think there is a coordinated strategy for lying about smoking in the context of a pandemic (much less revising patient medical histories, which would be the medical service industry lying). 50%+ lying about smoking in the face of potential (or actual) respiratory failure is laughable.
- dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  Maybe they're lying on the paper work because they're afraid their insurance rates will go up.
  - shim2k 6y ago
    The studies are not being conducted in the US alone.
- hwillis 6y ago
  The study isn't talking about history, it's talking about current smokers and many of the comments on the paper bring up concerns with how specific that is, and how many could have quit days before going to the hospital. I don't know where you got 50%+. The outpatient group was 5.3% current smokers vs expected (adjusted for age and sex) 26.9%. For inpatient it was 4.4% vs expected 17.9%. The fact that both groups had the same reported rate of current smokers (within experimental error) but very different expected rates says to me that you're only getting the people who are honest or simply incapable of quitting even while sick. Also, see this concern brought up: > Finally, and I believe this to be the most significant piece of data supporting the null hypothesis, the prevalence of never-smokers in the general population is approximately 0.75, if one subtracts the smoking incidence rate from 100. In your patient groups, non-smokers are strongly under-represented by about a factor of 2 relative to the general population, with 31% of outpatient and 32% of inpatient being labeled as never-smokers. This suggests to me that any amount of smoking actually puts one at risk for contracting COVID-19 as defined by this paper.

mytherin 6y ago

I haven't read this article in-depth, but at a glance I did not see this discussed there: can't this simply be explained by smokers generally having a lower life expectancy than non-smokers? If most people that have severe COVID complications and end up on the ICU are aged 80+, and generally smokers die before that age from smoking-related complications, doesn't it naturally follow that most people on the ICU will be non-smokers? Smoking will have killed the smokers before they become part of the high-risk group, after all.

fab1an 6y ago
Most of these studies correct for age because of that.
488643689 6y ago
Weird sentiment to think the researchers wouldn't identify and correct for such an obvious factor.
- mytherin 6y ago
  Correcting for something is much easier said than done, and it is very often done incorrectly. Blindly trusting researchers to do so is a mistake. Here is a quote from the abstract of the paper linked above: > Results: The inpatient group was composed of 343 patients, median age 65 yr: 206 men (601%, median age 66 years) and 137 women (39.9%, median age 65 years) with a rate of daily smokers of 4.4% (5.4% of men and 2.9% of women).The outpatient group was composed of 139 patients, median age 44 years: 62 men (44.6 %, median age 43 years, and 77 women (55.4 %, median age 44 years). The daily smokers rate was 5.3% (5.1% of men and 5.5 % of women). In the French population, the daily smokers rate was 25.4% (28.2% of men and 22.9% of women). The average daily smoker rate is taken as-is over the whole population, and compared to the smoking rate of people of age around ~66 years, despite the article itself stating that the percentage of daily smokers is lower for old people and higher for young people. So already in the abstract they have made a mistake and forgot to correct for age. I have not read the rest of the article in enough depth to judge fully, but I would absolutely not blindly trust researchers to always do this correction in an appropriate way.

lazyasciiart 6y ago

That is contradicted by the studies in the linked article >smokers with a positive Covid-19 test were more than twice as likely as non-smokers with coronavirus to be hospitalised. > This aligns with research from the US which found hospitalised smokers with coronavirus were 1.8 times more likely to die.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nyolfen 6y ago
i don't think it is a contradiction; "a very small fraction of smokers contract covid or end up in the hospital due to it; those that do are more likely to die"
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  This sentence: "smokers are shown to be substantially less susceptible to both catching covid and developing severe symptoms" is contradicted by the study showing that smokers with covid are more likely to have severe symptoms than non-smokers with covid.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

lol636363 6y ago

Also in countries like India and Pakistan with very high percentage of smokers, we are seeing very low COVID19 cases. While a lot of people are skeptical of the official numbers from these countries, I think they have free media and if cases were high, we would have known.