Does anyone else find this baffling as an avenue of exploration to begin with?
The health impacts of a 30 year old healthy male smoking tobacco massively outweigh what coronavirus would do to them in 99.9 percent of cases, likely higher.
It feels a bit like saying you could reduce your chance of toe cancer by amputating your toe. Theoretically sure, if you're already in a wheelchair, why not, no toes required.
Though you are right, this doesn’t mean that it’s not an interesting avenue of investigation by which we could learn something important about the disease.
> It feels a bit like saying you could reduce your chance of toe cancer by amputating your toe.
Not disagreeing with your actual point, but we do actually sometimes opt to remove body parts if the cancer risk is high enough, because cancer metastasizes.
So in the hypothetical toe-cancer case, you might go from a X0% chance of developing toe cancer with a Y0% chance of it metastasizing to a 0% chance, which might be worth losing a toe over.
it's an avenu of exploration that shows a correlation. It could end up being "taking a microdose of nicotine reduces covid-19 infection" and that wouldn't necessarily be seen as a major health impact that outweighs the effects of infection.
The health impacts of a 30 year old healthy male smoking tobacco massively outweigh what coronavirus would do to them in 99.9 percent of cases, likely higher.
It feels a bit like saying you could reduce your chance of toe cancer by amputating your toe. Theoretically sure, if you're already in a wheelchair, why not, no toes required.
But that's a niche line of enquiry.