Smoking and Covid-19 Again | Hacker News Reader

Smoking and Covid-19 Again

velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com

47 pointsthinkingemote14 comments

> When I wrote about this for Spiked nearly a year ago, it was the only time an article of mine has been marked with a 'fake news' warning on Facebook. Admittedly the headline was 'Smoke fags, save lives', but with hindsight it stands up better than a lot of what the World Health Organisation was saying at the time.

While this is quite funny, it's sad that WHO is prone to making inaccurate and unverified claims in a time when people are looking to them for an authoritative answer.

True. It's also sad that in the effort to stop "misinformation" and "Fake News", sites like Facebook and Twitter are censoring actual analysis which may disagree with the current consensus. That form of censorship is following the dogma, not the science.

Could an explanation be that people are lying about being non smokers both out of shame and for insurance reasons?

I lie about smoking. When the US changes to an ethical health scheme I will become ethical as well.

I vaped and got covid (march 2020). When I got sick I obviously didn't vape for a few days. Tried it once I felt a bit better and coughed immediately. Put it down and told myself I would wait until I was 100% better.

Still waiting unfortunately. Silver lining I guess is that I am off nicotine for a year.

It seems that this boils down to nicotine intake vs no nicotine intake. I wonder if this protective effect would change for people who use other tobacco products, such as dip or snus.

I'd be even more curious to see if it holds true for people who vape, since vape juice tends to have very little in it besides nicotine, polyethylene glycol, and flavoring.

I wonder if the form of nicotine would make a difference. Many brands of cigarettes use a tobacco that's been 'enhanced' with freebase nicotine to increase addictiveness among other things but others do not and the amount of freebase nicotine varies wildly between brands.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3990-crack-nicotine-i...

and vape juice comes in both freebase form and salt form.

https://www.ruthlessvapor.com/blogs/ruthless-e-liquid/nicoti...

Nicotine in a freebase form is absorbed more quickly into our bodies and in higher concentrations that nicotine in salt form.

For vaping, those with nic salts are way more concentrated (used in Juul)

Yes, they're more concentrated because in salt form our brains don't absorb as much of it. Like the difference between doing a bump of coke and a hit of crack. You gotta do a lot of coke to get the same high.

Or to expand on that, nicotine gum or nasal sprays

Or is it more about smoking? That could mean that standing around a campfire is better for you, in regards to COVID. The article mentions nitric oxide. Smoking also reduces the amount of oxygen inhaled by anyone smoking. Perhaps COVID needs clean air, or oxygen rich air. Conversely, I thought one of the theories for Italy experiencing high problems(mortality) with COVID, was the preponderance is smokers. Then again, there were reports last year, of air pollution as contributor to severity. It will be interesting to see what we learn five years from, when we have been able to look at more complete data sets.

Complications of smoking (addiction thereof) far outweigh the risks of COVID doesn't it.

It's a shame the original spike article by the author was titled "Smoke fags, save lives"

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