There’s been fake news circulating for some time, that smoking protects against COVID-19 according to Times of India. Times Now News recently reported University of Oxford researchers polled observational and genetic data to disprove this. They have been able to prove smoking worsens the severity of COVID-19, and their findings are quite dramatic.
Smokers Are More Likely to Go Hospital and Die
An earlier study in Wiley Online Library on August 21, 2021 supported the poor prognosis for smoking. This was after they found higher levels of biomarkers serum neutrophil, NLR, and ferritin among hospitalized current and ex-smokers. Laboratories use these markers to help confirm a COVID-19 infection. This created a direct link between those factors.
When the Oxford scientists ran the numbers, they found smokers were 80 per cent more likely to be admitted to hospital. And also significantly more likely to die from COVID too. Moreover, heavy tobacco smokers were 5 times more likely to go to hospital, and ten times more likely to die from the virus. We append a link to their report in BMJ Thorax at the end of this article.
More Proof Smoking Worsens the Severity of COVID-19
First, the University of Oxford researchers gathered COVID-19 test results, hospital admissions data, and death certificates of nearly a quarter million patients. These included almost 14,000 smokers, of whom 51 (1:270) were hospitalized and 36 died.
By comparison, they found only 1:600 (440) of the over 250,000 non-smokers went to hospital with COVID, again according to Times Now News. Of this far larger number, only 159 died. The idea tobacco smoking may protect against the coronavirus was always an improbable one, according to scientists. Smoking actually worsens the severity of COVID-19.
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