smokers hospitalized less often for covid

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Smokers Hospitalized Less Often for COVID-19 By Carolyn Crist

The hypothesis comes from Konstantinos Farsalinos, a cardiologist in Greece who focuses on tobacco-use reduction. Farsalinos noticed that few COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized in China were smokers, though about half of men in the country smoke.
Farsalinos and colleagues wrote a new paper available as a preprint and scheduled to be published in Internal and Emergency Medicine. They found that among 13 studies in China with nearly 6,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, the rate of smokers ranged from 1.4% to 12.6%. No studies recorded e-cigarette use.
“The results were remarkably consistent across all studies and were recently verified in the first case series of COVID-19 cases in the U.S.,” the authors wrote, calling for an “urgent investigation.”
Of course, Farsalinos doesn't recommend that people should begin smoking simply to attempt to avoid a severe case of COVID-19.