Smoking linked to higher risk of coronavirus: WHO

LONDON: The World Health Organisation says smoking is linked to a higher risk of severe illness and death from coronavirus in hospitalised patients, although it was unable to specify exactly how much greater those risks might be.

The harms of tobacco use are well-established. Tobacco causes 8 million deaths every year from cardiovascular diseases, lung disorders, cancers, diabetes, and hypertension. In the COVID-19 pandemic, questions have been asked about clinical outcomes for smokers, and whether they are equally susceptible to infection, and if nicotine has any biological effect on the SAR-CoV-2 virus.

The UN health agency in a scientific brief published this week, assessed 34 published studies on the link between smoking and COVID-19, including the probability of infection, hospitalization, severity of disease and death.

WHO stated that smokers constitute of 18% of hospitalised coronavirus patients and that there seemed to be a significant relation between whether or not patients smoked and the severity of disease they suffered, the type of hospital interventions required and patients’ risk of dying.

In April, French researchers, on the basis of a small study suggested smokers were at less risk of catching Covid-19 and planned to test nicotine patches on patients and health workers but their findings were questioned by many scientists at the time because of the lack of definitive data.

WHO added that available evidence suggests smoking is associated with increased severity of disease and death in hospitalized Covid-19 patients. It recommended the smokers to quit.