Quote:
Originally Posted by Eleazar
Many of the young people who are hospitalized with COVID are smokers/vapers. It's thought that because of the particular type of receptors the virus binds to in the lung, which are also affected by smoking and vaping, that smokers and vapers might be more vulnerable than first thought. Either one should be considered to put even a young person into a high risk category.
Perhaps vapers are overrepresented among covid patients as well because of how much sharing of those devices goes on or correlation with other risky behaviors such as a lack of distancing.
In any case, among people you wouldn't normally expect to get hit this hard by a virus, smokers and vapers seem to be right alongside the obese, diabetics, and people with other chronic lung/heart issues. FWIW
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I mentioned this obliquely earlier in the thread, but there is a thought that *some* the deleterious effects of COVID come from the downregulation of ACE2, an enzyme which converts angiotensin II to angiotensin 1-7. Ang 1-7 has several protective effects on the cardiovascular system, where as angiotensin II has harmful effects. If you remove the good and keep the bad, you will in essence create a positive (which is actually bad in homeostatic systems) feedback loop that will lead to cardiovascular and pulmonary injury.
Animal models have also demonstrated that smoking leads to an increase in Ang II and a decrease in ACE2. Again, more of the bad, less of the good.
If you take those factors together (again this is a theory without much evidence yet), then the mechanism of insult makes sense to me.
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"When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”--Abraham Lincoln
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