Smokers quit in record numbers amid Covid fears

Re:Smokers quit in record numbers amid Covid fears by elif on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @09:31PM (#23854744)

I think it's too early to absolutely determine the life expectancy cost of a covid infection. The pathology is so diverse with this virus it would take a very complex calculation and obviously years of observation to make your claim.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0968-3

To quote this paper's author: "This virus is unusual and it's hard not to take a step back and not be impressed by how many manifestations it has on the human body"

and to quote the paper itself: "In a study of nearly 5,500 patients admitted with COVID-19 in a New York City hospital system, (acute kidney injury) occurred in 37%, with 14% of the patients requiring dialysis. "

and that is only one of dozens of conditions in their findings.

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Re:Smokers quit in record numbers amid Covid fears by tripletao on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @10:49PM (#23855203)

Patients who die of coronavirus have median age of 78[1], and thus life expectancy around ten years. Younger decedents will have a disproportionate effect on average life years lost, so using the median life expectancy does tend to underestimate that. On the other hand, the patients who die were probably less healthy than the average for their age before they got infected (e.g., the huge mortality in nursing homes; nursing home patients already had an average life expectancy around a year[3]), which would make us overestimate. Somewhat arbitrarily, let's say those cancel, so a coronavirus death costs ten years of life.

The average IFR over all ages is 0.7%[4] from a recent meta-analysis. If we're considering prospective smokers, then I guess we should exclude young children, so let's (again, somewhat arbitrarily) bump that up to 1%. That would mean a coronavirus infection in a random individual (age weighted according to population of prospective smokers) costs 0.1 years of life expectancy.

But smokers have life expectancy about ten years[5] shorter than non-smokers! So there's lots you could find to argue about in my rough calculation above, and I agree that patients who don't die immediately still lose some yet-unknown number of quality-adjusted years of life; but unless you think you can find two orders of magnitude, smoking is unquestionably more dangerous. That doesn't mean the coronavirus is harmless, just that smoking is really bad.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6928e1.htm

2. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

3. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2010/08/98172/social-support-key-n...

4. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v...

5. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...

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Re:Smokers quit in record numbers amid Covid fears by Gibbon1 on Thursday July 16, 2020 @12:27AM (#23855762)

You may not know and it may be very hard to determine the ultimate loss of life expectancy in younger people. I read somewhere that people that survived a bad bout of polio often suffered poor health later in life. Long term kidney damage could easily be something a person could live with for decades before it came back to bite them.

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