[mytherin]

I haven't read this article in-depth, but at a glance I did not see this discussed there: can't this simply be explained by smokers generally having a lower life expectancy than non-smokers?

If most people that have severe COVID complications and end up on the ICU are aged 80+, and generally smokers die before that age from smoking-related complications, doesn't it naturally follow that most people on the ICU will be non-smokers? Smoking will have killed the smokers before they become part of the high-risk group, after all.

[488643689]

Weird sentiment to think the researchers wouldn't identify and correct for such an obvious factor.

[mytherin]

Correcting for something is much easier said than done, and it is very often done incorrectly. Blindly trusting researchers to do so is a mistake.

Here is a quote from the abstract of the paper linked above:

> Results: The inpatient group was composed of 343 patients, median age 65 yr: 206 men (601%, median age 66 years) and 137 women (39.9%, median age 65 years) with a rate of daily smokers of 4.4% (5.4% of men and 2.9% of women).The outpatient group was composed of 139 patients, median age 44 years: 62 men (44.6 %, median age 43 years, and 77 women (55.4 %, median age 44 years). The daily smokers rate was 5.3% (5.1% of men and 5.5 % of women). In the French population, the daily smokers rate was 25.4% (28.2% of men and 22.9% of women).

The average daily smoker rate is taken as-is over the whole population, and compared to the smoking rate of people of age around ~66 years, despite the article itself stating that the percentage of daily smokers is lower for old people and higher for young people.

So already in the abstract they have made a mistake and forgot to correct for age. I have not read the rest of the article in enough depth to judge fully, but I would absolutely not blindly trust researchers to always do this correction in an appropriate way.

[fab1an]

Most of these studies correct for age because of that.