I assume smoking and vaping is making this worse for some, but haven't seen anything reported or stats yet. Anyone in the hospitals have any info they could share? Trying to scare straight a stubborn 70 year old...

Naturally since people are dying from not getting oxygen from their lungs... then vaping, smoking or anything else lessening the amount of oxygen in your blood will be bad.

I would assume smoking would only make it worse not better, but I'm not a doctor and don't have proof to back it up so what the hell do I know

The retrospective studies on this will be very interesting.

Obviously data collection on less symptomatic patients has been lacking, but there will be a treasure trove of data on hospitalized patients for future data miners to sift through. I do think we will see a trend that correlates history of smoking and lung disease to the need for hospitalization. Obviously not the only factor as I'm sure plenty of folks are being hospitalized who don't have that history, but there will likely be a correlation.

Just curious if any doctors or nurses are seeing any correlations with their patients.

I've been waiting to see a multivariate analysis re: smokers vs nonsmokers and relative risk for ventilator requirement and mortality. We DO know that pulmonary and cardiovascular disease increases your death rate with the virus. As highly concentrated as the virus is in the nasopharynx, I can't imagine that smokers don't get viremic earlier than non smokers. And as smoking (vaping does so to a lesser degree) kills the cilia that sweep away viruses and other irritants, i would think that initial viral load (which some think is inversely correlated to eventual outcome) will be significantly higher in smokers. Itwould seem that once all of the data are analyzed, smoking will be an independent risk factor for morbidity and mortality in Covid-19. It's also possible that we won't have that answer until this pandemic has passed and epidemiologists have done their studies.