EDITORIAL: COVID-19 has terrible connection to smoking rates

OPINION:

Public health officials and puritans of every stripe have long had to contend with one basic fact of human nature: We like drinking and smoking. Indeed, humans have been distilling alcohol since, quite literally, the beginning of recorded history. (Those slaves who built the pyramids of Egypt, while having a tough go of it, at least got to lubricate their labors with copious amounts of beer.)

The same goes for smoking, as out of fashion as it has fallen here in the United States, at least among the upper middle classes and above. Humans have been indulging in some form of tobacco smoking since at least 5,000 BC. The recent turn against smoking in the United States is just that — very recent. Even movies made in the mid-1990s depict a world in which people freely light up in restaurants, bars and even offices.

COVID-19, the mysterious coronavirus from China that has sickened hundreds of thousands and killed some 40,000 people worldwide, is particularly vicious on men; in some places, the virus seems to kill men over women at a rate of two to one. Medical authorities are not quite sure why this is, though it seems that it might have something to do with smoking rates.

China, where the virus emerged from, is still a smokers’ paradise — much akin to those old movies that depict the halcyon days of smoke-’em-if-you-got-’em America. In places like Wuhan, epicenter of the virus, people routinely light up not just in restaurants and bars, but even in elevators and lines. But perhaps “people” is the wrong word. In China, men smoke. More than half of them, do at least. Women smokers are few and far between.

COVID-19 is a respiratory illness, a virus that attacks the lungs. Some scientists have suggested, therefore, that the reason men are suffering from it disproportionately is because it is they who smoke. Further evidence for this logical-seeming surmise: Italy and Spain, two of the hardest-hit countries by the coronavirus, are full of heavy smokers.

Smokers have for at least a half century known their habit is a dangerous one. Cancers, emphysema and heart disease await many smokers, a fact that has failed to persuade hundreds of millions to quit. That may be, however, because those ailments take years, even decades to develop. COVID-19, meanwhile, can crop up quickly and kill you in less than three weeks. If there was ever an ailment that could persuade people to drop the habit once and for all, the coronavirus would seem to be it.