Forum Topic

OpenSAFELY: factors associated with COVID-19-related hospital death

Unreliable and patchy data has been a serious problem with understanding the Covid pandemic. This study is a significant step forward as it looks at the electronic medical records of over 17 million UK patients to establish what factors contributed to deaths of hospital patients with Covid.The chart on page 11 is a handy summary with factor risk increasing to the right.Some takeaway points are:Under 40s have extremely low risk of dying.Obesity is a major factor.Men are more at risk.Black and Asian people are more at risk.Smokers have a slightly lowered risk.https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v1.full.pdf

Andy Riley ● 2367d5 Comments

Smokers have slightly lower risk.As smoking causes health issues why less at risk.

Janice Evans ● 2367d

I know this doesn't answer your question about smokers, but another thing that is very surprising about COVID19 is how people can carry on with far lower levels of oxygen in their blood than would normally be the case - Silent Hypoxia.https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/they-do-not-struggle-to-breathe-but-coronavirus-starves-them-of-oxygen-cvd/

Andrew Jones ● 2366d

what I have seen around as an explanation is that nicotine attaches to the ACE2 receptors so they can sort of be 'engaged' and SARS-CoV-2 has a harder job to invade cells,however, there is another receptor D something (sorry name escapes me at the mo) that the virus can attach tooand once infected, smokers will have a harder time defeating COVID, so not straight forward good news for smokersanyway, that is what I recall seeing a while back, but not looked deeply into it, so take it as a possible explanation onlyre: Silent Hypoxia, yes apparently people can feel great as level of oxygen declines to dangerous levels,and I have recently invested in a blood oxygen measurement gadget 'pulse oximeter' and find it very reassuring, personally

Claudia Jachtmann ● 2366d

I was chatting to a pal in Saudi earlier, one of his pals is a senior medic, he was saying that the approach there is once anyone gets symptoms they go to hospital and their oxygen levels are monitored. They have had a low death rate but he did say it’s one of the youngest populations in the world. They are also experiencing the same re smokers and their view not backed up scientifically is that the acid in cigarette kills the virus. Gosh so many views around the world desperately trying to understand this virus.

Jayne Thorburn ● 2366d

there seem to be a lot of trials now of nicotine also via patches and nicotine gum, i.e. not necessarily smokingand sales being limited now for instance in France a lot of articles to read via 'nicotine patches coronavirus' search for those interested

Claudia Jachtmann ● 2366d