Who are the people most at risk from Coronavirus? Is one blood group more protected than another? Are women less affected? What about children? There are many questions that researchers are still raising about Covid-19. The one that has come up the most in the last few days is rather contradictory. When we know that the people who suffer most from respiratory diseases are the least resistant to this virus, why is it that the proportion of smokers among the sick is quite low in all the studies we have?
The New England Journal of Medicine reports that only 12.6% of every 1,000 people infected in China are smokers. Further data confirm this, in France, according to the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, out of 11,000 hospitalized patients, 8.5% were smokers.
Could nicotine have a protective effect on the virus? In any case, this is what neurobiologists think. According to them, nicotine could prevent the Coronavirus from entering the cells of smokers! But beware, smokers contaminated with Covid-19 have a much weaker immune response than non-smokers. Playing with fire could therefore have an even more harmful effect, especially since tobacco remains a major mortality factor in Morocco and around the world. The Anti-Tobacco Alliance had warned smokers that tobacco increases the risk of developing “a severe form of the disease”. Nicotine addiction alone can, these days, cause other, equally uncontrollable health damage. However, in these times of confinement, a smoker will find it very difficult to stop smoking and will even tend to push the dose. Unless he or she is a teenager or someone who has to smoke secretly. In the latter two specific cases, we could then conclude that this is a blessing in disguise and vice versa.
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