Smokers seem less likely than non-smokers to fall ill with covid-19

A QUARTER OFSARSCVThe EconomistThe Economist Today French adults smoke. Many people were surprised, therefore, when researchers reported late in April that only 5% of 482 covid-19 patients who came to the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris between February 28th and April 9th were daily smokers. The ratios of smokers to non-smokers in earlier tallies at hospitals in America, China and elsewhere in France varied. But all revealed habitual smokers to be significantly underrepresented among those requiring hospital treatment for the illness. Smokers, the authors of the report wrote, “are much less likely” to suffer severely from -o-2, the virus that causes covid-19. Rarely, they added, is such a result seen in medicine.