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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

#41

Post by gregwebs »

raverbashing wrote: post #30
gregwebs wrote: post #21

It would make sense if smoking (the oxidants from smoke) kills the virus. However, once the infection actually progresses it is clear that smokers are worse off. https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/covid-19/covid-19-and-the-smo...

Actually in the article there's a different proposed explanation related to nicotine and its withdraw when in an hospital setting.

The nicotine explanation in the article discussion isn't actually studied, it is just pure speculation (which is fine, mine is as well). But there's no explanation why there's fewer smokers even though smokers have more ACE2 receptors. That's table stakes for having a hypothesis on this.

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

#42

Post by ebg13 »

LatteLazy wrote: post #39
ebg13 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

"...and therefore they have a strong undeclared interest in making it look like smoking inversely correlates with infection."

Citation needed.

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

#43

Post by scandox »

There is a story from the Golden Age of Science Fiction called Pandemic by JF Bone. It postulates a global virus the cure for which in the end turns out to be smoking tobacco.

And the improbably beautiful nurse marries the curmudgeon who is her boss.

And they put babies in smoke ventilators.

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

#44

Post by LatteLazy »

ebg13 wrote: post #42
LatteLazy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

"...and therefore they have a strong undeclared interest in making it look like smoking inversely correlates with infection." Citation needed.

Did you reply to the wrong comment? I only know they're making number up, that's well documented...

Citation for the fairness of Chinese numbers:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/01/china-coronavirus-offic...

Also:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/china-denies-c...

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

#45

Post by ebg13 »

LatteLazy wrote: post #38
ebg13 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dat…

> You named a hypothesis but the experiment doesn't test that hypothesis does it?

This paper doesn't claim to be an experiment to test that hypothesis. That's all you.

This paper claims to be a data record highlighting an interesting trend for future experimentation.

The hypothesis for cause is in the DISCUSSION section at the end and references things that we already know about interactions between nicotine, ACE2, and sars-cov-2.

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

#46

Post by 11235813213455 »

That's maybe because someone who has a "strong enough health" to tolerate smoking, builds some resistance in the short term. That's in the long term that smoking is really deadly though

That kind of study would also find out that people doing daily physical exercise would be much less affected by Covid, etc..

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

#47

Post by LatteLazy »

ebg13 wrote: post #45
LatteLazy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dat…

> You named a hypothesis but the experiment doesn't test that hypothesis does it? This paper doesn't claim to be an experiment to test that hypothesis. That's all you. This paper claims to be a data record highlighting an interesting trend for future experimentation. The hypothesis for cause is in the DISCUSSION section at the end and references things that we already know about interactions between nicotine, ACE2, a…

Call it what you like, experiment or report, hypothesis (your word) or trend (I think this the wrong term but I can't think of abetter one...).

As it is, they have found nothing because they did such a bad job of looking. Leaving aside that apparently 601% of patients were men (now there is a concerning trend), they haven't tested nicotine or smokers because their methods don't differentiate the Corona cases involving those factors from ones that don't.

Nicotine could kill every user and this study wouldn't find that, nicotine could make its users immortal and this study wouldn't notice. That's what makes it bad: they found nothing because they did a bad job of looking.

This is a badly dressed up version of "my aunt smoked and she lived to be 97 so it can't be all bad".

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

#48

Post by shakopeeant »

LatteLazy wrote: post #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 weakness…

I firmly believe HN users could do a study and they would still disagree with their own results.

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

#49

Post by downerending »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #26
downerending wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be a joke, but I'm "addicted" to nicotine gum (and don't otherwise smoke). I probably caught the virus early on, and it wasn't particularly bad for me (even compared to typical flu). That's not even really a single data point, but I'm curious to see how this pans out.

> I probably caught the virus early on, and it wasn't particularly bad for me (even compared to typical flu). Do you have reason to believe that, or were you sick in January/February and just kind of assume that was it, even though we were at the height of regular cold and flu season?

Just circumstantial. I was knocked down with something I self-diagnosed as "walking pneumonia", which turned out to be the thing a lot of these cases were diagnosed as before the virus was widely known. Several days after a flight. Main symptom was lots of coughing and some fever. Felt better after 7-10 days, but coughed frequently for several more weeks. Not really the aches of flu, nor any nasal/sinus symptoms--just totally wiped out.

Until we have antibody tests, no way to know. And I'm locked down hard--not assuming anything.

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

#50

Post by jholdn »

It's an interesting data discrepancy - fewer smokers in covid-19 infected individuals - but it doesn't tell us much. The survival bias is a problem. They took the smoking status of alive patients, not in the ICU. The results could indicate the opposite effect. Smokers tend to be in the ICU or die at an accelerated rate so are under-represented. That said, one would expect counter-acting effects in such a situation that would make the counter-intuitive result of fewer smokers meaning it's worse for smokers less likely, e.g. greater diagnosis rate in smokers due to increased severity, higher rates of infection in smokers, etc.

I don't think any conclusions can be drawn from this study. It does suggest that there is value in investigating the impacts of smoking on Covid-19.

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