by Carl V Phillips
Many of you will have already seen or heard about a paper by Farsalinos et al., in which they review some case series data from China and observe that for hospitalized COVID-19 patients, the recorded smoking prevalence is far lower than would be expected given the population prevalence. The US CDC also released data a couple of days ago that shows the same pattern. If the data is representative and accurate (but note that there are compelling reasons to question whether either of those is true), this strongly suggests that smoking is hugely protective against COVID-19 inflection and/or the resulting disease progressing to the point that hospitalization is required.
We are not talking at the level of “well I guess smokers get a bit of compensation this year for all the health costs of smoking.” This is at the level of “everyone should take up smoking for a few months until the pandemic abates.” The protective effect implied by the data is absolutely huge. Continue reading
Tobacco harm reduction, anti-THR lies, and related topics 