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Low incidence of daily active tobacco smoking in patients with symptomatic C19

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Re: Low incidence of daily active tobacco smoking in patients with symptomatic C19

#31
post #23
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that smoking itself isn't a pre-existing condition that makes you more likely to be hospitalized if you get Covid-19.

It's important to be careful here: the finding above is with symptomatic covid, not hospitalization. We don't know whether or not it makes you more likely to be hospitalized.

Or that you disregard some symptoms as normal because your smoking habit: coughing, dry throat, etc.

Re: Low incidence of daily active tobacco smoking in patients with symptomatic C19

#32
I find it fascinating how willing people are to accept the vital importance of chemicals not directly related to covid 19 or coronaviruses. People were very willing to swallow Chloroquine as a "cure" or treatment, but that is (was?) used for treating malaria (not a virus). Now tobacco smoke is preventative? And that must be because of nicotine. Not one of 1000s of other chemicals in the same smoke? And forget that other research found smoking increased the density of the proteins covid 19 binds to to enter cells (another small study with unverified results I think).

Jesus people, the solution to this problem will not be as simple as antimalarials or taking up Cuban cigars. Stop grasping at straws like they are lifeboats!

Re: Low incidence of daily active tobacco smoking in patients with symptomatic C19

#33
post #31
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to be careful here: the finding above is with symptomatic covid, not hospitalization. We don't know whether or not it makes you more likely to be hospitalized.

Or that you disregard some symptoms as normal because your smoking habit: coughing, dry throat, etc.

Right, or that there's some other confounding factor that leads smokers to be less likely to contract the disease or seek treatment. This kind of science (teasing data out of uncontrolled sampling) is really hard.

Re: Low incidence of daily active tobacco smoking in patients with symptomatic C19

#34

I find it fascinating how willing people are to accept the vital importance of chemicals not directly related to covid 19 or coronaviruses. People were very willing to swallow Chloroquine as a "cure" or treatment, but that is (was?) used for treating malaria (not a virus). Now tobacco smoke is preventative? And that must be because of nicotine. Not one of 1000s of other chemicals in the same smoke? And forget that ot…

This has nothing to do with "accept the vital importance of chemicals" and everything to do with the fact that we record smoker status when patients enter hospitals and HOLY COW, LOOK, A TREND IN THE DATA.

> Now tobacco smoke is preventative?

Maybe! If you just casually ignore data, you will miss opportunities for important discovery.

> And that must be because of nicotine. Not one of 1000s of other chemicals in the same smoke?

That's called a _hypothesis_. Hypotheses are somewhat important for research.

Re: Low incidence of daily active tobacco smoking in patients with symptomatic C19

#36
This paper is terrible. There are errors in the abstract. It uses percentage of percentages to make results look important. It relies on self reporting when people are strongly encouraged to misreport. It excludes groups arbitrarily (no ICU patients, no one treated by certain departments). Its all about 1 hospital for a few weeks in one part of France.

Its like a test paper to teach people to spot errors and weaknesses in papers.

Re: Low incidence of daily active tobacco smoking in patients with symptomatic C19

#37

This paper is terrible. There are errors in the abstract. It uses percentage of percentages to make results look important. It relies on self reporting when people are strongly encouraged to misreport. It excludes groups arbitrarily (no ICU patients, no one treated by certain departments). Its all about 1 hospital for a few weeks in one part of France. Its like a test paper to teach people to spot errors and weakness…

> Its all about 1 hospital for a few weeks in one part of France.

We already have similar results from hospitals all over China. This is gravy.

Read the "smoking history" section of Table 1. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2002032 and compare it to smoking rates in China over the past several decades.

Re: Low incidence of daily active tobacco smoking in patients with symptomatic C19

#38
post #34

I find it fascinating how willing people are to accept the vital importance of chemicals not directly related to covid 19 or coronaviruses. People were very willing to swallow Chloroquine as a "cure" or treatment, but that is (was?) used for treating malaria (not a virus). Now tobacco smoke is preventative? And that must be because of nicotine. Not one of 1000s of other chemicals in the same smoke? And forget that ot…

This has nothing to do with "accept the vital importance of chemicals" and everything to do with the fact that we record smoker status when patients enter hospitals and HOLY COW, LOOK, A TREND IN THE DATA. > Now tobacco smoke is preventative? Maybe! If you just casually ignore data, you will miss opportunities for important discovery. > And that must be because of nicotine. Not one of 1000s of other chemicals in the…

Now you're in trouble. You named a hypothesis but the experiment doesn't test that hypothesis does it? No one checked whether any or all of these people actually smoked. Weirdly they let them report different levels of smoking but don't include that data And no one thought to ask about vaping (where there are far fewer chemicals and you would have a stronger case to pin point nicotine). Plus they included Chinese data which is mostly made up. And they excluded random arbitrarily groups (no ICU patients, maybe all the smokers went straight there?).

A good experiment is one where you learn something. You prove or disprove your hypothesis.

This paper doesn't mean anything. Like you say, the answer to the question si "maybe". Maybe nicotine helps, maybe it doesn't. Maybe literally any chemical helps, maybe it doesn't. Great, thanks for wasting everyone time...

Re: Low incidence of daily active tobacco smoking in patients with symptomatic C19

#39
post #37

This paper is terrible. There are errors in the abstract. It uses percentage of percentages to make results look important. It relies on self reporting when people are strongly encouraged to misreport. It excludes groups arbitrarily (no ICU patients, no one treated by certain departments). Its all about 1 hospital for a few weeks in one part of France. Its like a test paper to teach people to spot errors and weakness…

> Its all about 1 hospital for a few weeks in one part of France. We already have similar results from hospitals all over China. This is gravy. Read the "smoking history" section of Table 1. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2002032 and compare it to smoking rates in China over the past several decades.

We don't have any data for China. None of their numbers are reliable, they make them up. This is one of the biggest issues in this pandemic: we don't know shit partly because China insist on lying...

Re: Low incidence of daily active tobacco smoking in patients with symptomatic C19

#40
post #12
post #4

Interesting, they hypothesize that nicotine is responsible: > There are however, sufficient scientific data to suggest that smoking protection is likely to be mediated by nicotine. SARS-CoV2 is known to use the angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor for cell entry[14-16], and there is evidence that nicotine modulates ACE2 expression[17]which could in turn modulate the nicotinic acetyl choline receptor (manus…

Not in medical field, but nicotine is generally biotoxic and used as a pesticide so i'm not at all surprised. Detriments to any symbiotic microorganisms aside, regularly spraying the lungs and other airways with a light coating of biotoxic film seems a good way to generally inhibit replication or damage any negative bioparticles, so long as the damage doesn't overwhelmingly interfere with the smoker's own biological…

Being toxic to an insect or human doesn't mean it will have any effect on a virus.

IIRC the reason nicotine is poisonous to humans is because it binds to receptors involved in nerve function, which in turn are required to control muscles.

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