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The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

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Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#61

Post by drewrv »

acdha wrote: post #22

This story is trying way too hard to be controversial, starting with the incorrect claim that “back then Big Tech’s fact-checkers were still describing claims about SARS-CoV-2 being airborne and face masks preventing infection as ‘misleading’”. His recounting of his personal Google search results is an amusing anecdote but it’s just showing his search history - the same search without a Google cookie turns up a coupl…

The actual reason is probably unrelated to the act of smoking. Smokers are different than the general population in a number of ways - Smokers are addicted to an appetite suppressant and are skinnier than the general population. Since obesity is linked to poor covid outcomes that could play a role. - I'd guess that smokers are younger on average since, grimly, they don't make it into old age as often (or they quit). Age is also linked to poor covid outcomes. - Smokers spend more time outdoors and are more likely to sit outdoors at restaurants/bars.

It's definitely an interesting statistical effect but I don't think there's any actionable information in the correlation.

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#62

Post by Something1234 »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #44
xphilter wrote: post #15

Smoking cover up? Goodness. Let’s assume you’re right and smoking prevents Covid. The answer would be to get everyone to start smoking??? Get everyone hooked on nicotine? If the goal is to prevent Covid, masks are better—they’re cheap, easy, and have no side effects. (Which drives people mad, but imagine telling them to start smoking instead. Actually I could see the anti-maskers firing up a box a day lol).

This is such a horribly immature statement to make. There are many chemicals in cigarettes that can be utilized to either prevent or understand how Covid infects the human body, and what we can do to stop it. The nicotonic receptors are highly utilized by the immune system. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11062-007-0037-2 I’m really getting tired of this lack of creative thought in thinking about health an…

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Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#64

Post by gopalv »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #14

Author compiled a lot of studies on his web log: https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2021/08/smoking-and... The studies do appear to show that smoking cigarettes is correlated with a lower probability of getting the Covid, for a lot of different definitions of "getting the Covid." They also appear to be, by eyeball aggregate, inconclusive as to whether the risk of dying from the Covid is higher or lower for smok…

> The studies do appear to show that smoking cigarettes is correlated with a lower probability of getting the Covid

The problem is that non-smokers is not a single category of people, so the confounding factor for the correlation is "why X does not smoke".

For example, if you had a study which compared moderate drinkers to non-drinkers, but not carve out "cannot drink due to other medication" from the second group, you get a more discriminatory result from the study. The real problem of course is that confounding factors are almost fractal in nature.

On the other hand, if you had a comparison saying "Smokers replace their mucus linings more frequently than non-smokers, expectorating the virus with it", then that I would buy as a causation. Coughing up phlegm does offer a direct means of explaining a reduced exposure.

> I would not recommend taking up a cigarette habit just because of the Covid

So there's a weird thing that happens when news about a new improvement in life comes up.

A study gets published "people who eat dark chocolate live longer", but then a bunch of relatively unhealthy but optimistic people actively choose to eat dark chocolate or drink red wine or whatever new superfood, but fail to live longer as a result. Mostly because they just made that one change, plus there are now a thousand more manufacturers of the same product (say Manuka honey), with varying fades of quality as time goes on.

So a change in human behaviour is triggered by a study both for consumption and production, which ends up proving that the original study modified the circumstances in which it was originally true. And we are in the quest for a better causation of the original observation.

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#65

Post by snowwrestler »

pessimizer wrote: post #48
acdha wrote: post #22

This story is trying way too hard to be controversial, starting with the incorrect claim that “back then Big Tech’s fact-checkers were still describing claims about SARS-CoV-2 being airborne and face masks preventing infection as ‘misleading’”. His recounting of his personal Google search results is an amusing anecdote but it’s just showing his search history - the same search without a Google cookie turns up a coupl…

> the incorrect claim that “back then Big Tech’s fact-checkers were still describing claims about SARS-CoV-2 being airborne and face masks preventing infection as ‘misleading’”. This is a not an incorrect claim, it is a correct claim.

Both the original SARS and coronaviruses in general are known to spread via droplets in the air, and from the beginning folks assumed this was one way SARS-COV-2 spread.

What was unknown was how long the virus could remain viable after the droplets landed on surfaces. If it is a long time, then mishandling a soiled mask could easily undo any benefit of wearing it. This is the same reason people were washing their groceries and mail. We now know that is spreads very poorly this way, so we wear masks and we don’t wash our groceries anymore.

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#67

Post by Alex3917 »

NoPie wrote: post #56
i_am_proteus wrote: post #14

Author compiled a lot of studies on his web log: https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2021/08/smoking-and... The studies do appear to show that smoking cigarettes is correlated with a lower probability of getting the Covid, for a lot of different definitions of "getting the Covid." They also appear to be, by eyeball aggregate, inconclusive as to whether the risk of dying from the Covid is higher or lower for smok…

Equally we have many studies showing that vitamin D helps to reduce risk from covid (hint: it doesn't). More studies show that ivermectin has a positive effect in covid patients. In fact, ivermectin has no effect or has only a very weak effect in certain patients. In medicine observational studies suffer from certain problems that are hard to overcome. The biggest is that the groups are not equal. For example, smoker…

> Equally we have many studies showing that vitamin D helps to reduce risk from covid (hint: it doesn't).

But we know the reason for this; in order to get the circulatory and anti-viral benefits of vitamin D, you need to be exposed to a sufficient amount of UVA. But most folks who are getting a sufficient amount of UVA are also getting enough UVB to make enough vitamin D in the first place, which is what always causes the outcomes of the studies to look equivocal. It's really not that complicated, but researchers keep running fake studies to scam money out of the government and make pharma drugs look more effective by comparison.

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#68

Post by detaro »

josefresco wrote: post #8

I immediately check out whenever someone says "Google it and see what comes up" as "evidence" proving some conspiracy. Also, this is weird hill to die on. This dude has amassed a mega-blog post with a ton of aggregated studies - it's not a small amount of work. Anecdotally my only family member who regularly smokes just got COVID.

Also googling the topic I find plenty "news" articles basically saying what the meta-analysis they reference also says, from later than 2020 which according to the authro was the only time this possibility was acknowledged. Somehow that's basically always the case if someone claims that something wasn't reported. (But I'm sure the author would find reasons to discount that reporting because it's not as unequivocally positive as they think the topic is or ...)

Re: The great Covid and smoking cover-up?

#70

Post by kazinator »

What I don't understand is why this has just emerged. Surely, this effect is not selective specifically for SARS-CoV? We have been smoking for eons, and have had respiratory viruses for bigger eons. Is there no documentation about whether smokers catch colds and flus more or less?

It reminds of how we supposedly didn't start knowing anything about the effectiveness of masks until 2020.

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