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If You’re Still Vaping, Experts Urge You to Stop
The latest learnings on vaping and the coronavirus
When the novel coronavirus began spreading in the United States, many people thought that it was yet another virus that would mostly claim the lives of the elderly. That’s what early data from China suggested: People over the age of 60 and those with serious underlying health conditions were more likely to die. The earliest spate of deaths in the U.S. occurred in a nursing home outside of Seattle, Washington, where 35 out of 129 people there have succumbed to the disease.
For a while, there was the sentiment that, “if you’re less than 60 years of age, you’re safe. Don’t worry about it,” says Raj Parikh, MD, a pulmonary fellow at Boston University Medical. But now, as the U.S. is becoming one of the countries that’s hardest hit and more data comes in, it’s becoming clearer: “Covid is not sparing you depending on your age,” Parikh says.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently came out with an analysis that showed that while fatality due to the coronavirus is highest in the elderly, millennials are not invincible. And new data shows that so far about a fifth of people who need hospitalization in the U.S. due to the coronavirus are between 20–44 years old. The rise in hospitalization among young people has raised the question of what other risk factors might lead to severe disease. Among some of these culprits may be obesity, asthma, and perhaps — vaping.
Data from China showed that men are more likely to get severe Covid-19 symptoms than women, perhaps owing to the fact that they are heavier smokers. “Vaping and smoking share a lot of the same mechanisms of damage,” says Amit Gaggar, MD, PhD, a pulmonologist and critical care doctor at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. This could lead to a widespread increase in infection and lung damage. There’s not enough data yet, but there’s “good plausible reasoning that vaping could be a potential primer to [lung] injury,” he says.
People with the coronavirus often end up in the intensive care unit (ICU) because they have what pulmonologists call acute lung injury. This happens when there is so much damage to the lungs that people need help breathing, and are then put on a ventilator.
