Sir Harry Solomon School of Economics and Management, Western Galilee College, 2412101, Acre, Israel.
Institute of Urban and Regional Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, 9190501, Jerusalem, Israel.
Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2022 Aug;29(36):55302-55310. doi: 10.1007/s11356-022-21240-8. Epub 2022 Jun 10.
There are many risk factors associated with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, including low wind speed, fossil fuel energy production, air pollution, and smoking. Several studies argue that smoking is not a risk factor for COVID-19 morbidity among males or any other sub-group. The study aims to analyze the following research questions: (1) can smoking prevalence explain COVID-19 indicators (cases, mortality, and recovery)? Are these relationships monotonically increasing or decreasing? In an attempt to test the counter-intuitive possibility of a non-linear relationship, the proposed empirical model relaxes the assumption of monotonic change by applying the quadratic design and testing which one of the two competing models (quadratic or linear) better fits the data. Findings suggest more complex relationships between corona indices and prevalence of smoking than previously thought. These patterns might be explained by several conditions such as the attenuation of hypercytokinemia for mild levels of smoking prevalence compared with non-smokers, elevated social distancing of smokers in countries with lower smoking prevalence, and unidentified factors that should be examined in future research.
有许多与 COVID-19 大流行传播相关的风险因素，包括低风速、化石燃料能源生产、空气污染和吸烟。几项研究认为，吸烟并不是男性或任何其他亚组 COVID-19 发病率的危险因素。本研究旨在分析以下研究问题：(1) 吸烟率能否解释 COVID-19 指标（病例、死亡率和康复率）？这些关系是单调递增还是递减？为了检验非线性关系的反直觉可能性，所提出的经验模型通过应用二次设计来放松单调变化的假设，并测试两个竞争模型（二次或线性）中哪一个更适合数据。研究结果表明，冠状病毒指数与吸烟率之间的关系比以前想象的更为复杂。这些模式可能可以用以下几种情况来解释，例如与不吸烟者相比，吸烟率较低时细胞因子血症的衰减、吸烟率较低的国家吸烟者的社交距离加大，以及未来研究中应检查的其他未确定因素。
