UK researchers, who reported their discovery this week in
the British medical journal Thorax, said active smokers have an 80% higher
chance of needing to be admitted to hospital after a Covid-19 infection than
those who do not smoke.
One in three SA men and one in 14 women smoke cigarettes
regularly, according to the Tobacco Control Data Initiative dashboard.
Cigarette sales were controversially banned between March
27 and August 18 2020 under lockdown regulations, and co-operative governance
minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma argued in court that the ban was needed to
reduce the incidence of smoking and the risks posed by Covid-19 to smokers and
to those exposed to cigarette smoke.
The high court in Cape Town ruled that the ban limited
smokers' rights to human dignity because it denied them the choice of buying
tobacco products.
In an editorial linked to the new research, Anthony Laverty
and Christopher Millet of Imperial College London said the suggestion early in
the pandemic that smoking may protect against Covid-19 was always improbable.
“A respiratory pandemic should be the ideal moment to focus
collective minds on tobacco control,” they said.
Lead researcher Dr Ashley Clift said the results strongly
suggest that smoking is related to a risk of severe Covid-19.
“Just as smoking affects your risk of heart disease,
different cancers, and all those other conditions we know smoking is linked to,
it appears that it’s the same for Covid-19. So now might be as good a time as
any to quit cigarettes and quit smoking,” he said.
The study analysed eight months of UK hospital records
involving 421,469 patients - the so-called UK Biobank cohort - for a link
between smokers, Covid-19 and severe infections.
Almost two-thirds (60%) of participants had never smoked,
over a third (37%) were former smokers and only 4% were current smokers.
Among current smokers, most (71%) were light or moderate
smokers (1-19 cigarettes/day); only 29% were heavy smokers (20+/day).
Compared with those who had never smoked, current smokers
were 80% more likely to be admitted to hospital and significantly more likely
to die from Covid-19.
TimesLIVE
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