The study titled, “Association between smoking, e-cigarette use and severe COVID-19: a cohort study,” comprised of 7 ,869, 534 participants people representative of the population of England with smoking status, demographic factors and diseases recorded by general practitioners and linked to hospital data. The outcomes were COVID-19-associated hospitalization, intensive care unit (ICU) admission and death.
In line with previous studies, the current study found that when compared to never smokers, current smokers were found to be at lower risk of all three outcomes, and therefore at a reduced risk of severe COVID-19 symptoms. Similar patterns were observed between vapers and non vapers, however the differences were less pronounced between those between smokers and non smokers.
Countless other studies have studied the link between nicotine consumption and the chances of contracting COVID-19. Renowned anti-smoking researcher Dr. Konstantinos Farsalinos and two colleagues analyzed data coming out of China, where it was widely speculated that the higher hospitalization and death rates among Chinese men was due to gender differences in smoking rates. However, Farsalinos found that there were significantly less smokers among hospitalized COVID-19 patients.
Smoking was associated with a decreased risk of contracting COVID
Similarly, another review of the Chinese data published in the European Journal of Internal Medicine concluded that “active smoking does not apparently seem to be significantly associated with enhanced risk of progressing towards severe disease in COVID-19,” but quite the contrary.
Subsequently, similar patterns started emerging from around the world. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have shown that smokers represented just 1.3% of COVID-19 cases analyzed, while America’s adult smoking rate is at 13.7%.
New Study Suggests Relationship Between Smoking and COVID-19 Severity
