Smoking Associated with Covid-19 Progression

There is still a lot of uncertainty about the coronavirus, but one thing we know is that it attacks the lungs. 

That’s why a growing number of doctors and public health officials are urging people to stop smoking and/or vaping during the pandemic.

A University of California, San Francisco study had shown that smoking is associated with substantially higher risk of Covid-19 progression. 

Stanton Glantz (right), a professor of medicine at the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education did a meta-analysis, which looked at 19 peer-reviewed papers from China, South Korea and the United States. It found 30% of smokers developed more severe forms of Covid-19 compared to 17.6% of non-smokers. 

He and his colleagues wrote in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research that “smoking and e-cigarette use increase the risk and severity of pulmonary infections because of damage to upper airways and a decrease in pulmonary immune function in general, although these effects have not yet been studied for SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19”. 

The analysis likely underestimated how smoking affects the risk of contracting the coronavirus in the general population, the authors said, because the studies the analysis is based on were only focused on those who had already developed Covid-19. 

Nonetheless, the authors urged health officials to add smoking cessation for both tobacco and e-cigarette products to the list of steps needed to curb the pandemic, and are advocating for more data collection on smokers and e-cigarette users to see if they’re at greater risk of contracting the disease.