SMOKERS ARE GOING TO LOVE THIS BLOG. NON SMOKERS? YEAH. MAYBE NOT SO MUCH!

I'm going to wind the clock back twenty five years. A much younger me was heading south down the M6 when things started to unravel. It is fair to say I wasn't exactly in tip top shape back then. I was a heart attack waiting to happen and the odds on me making my fortieth birth day were pretty much slim to none. My life was a caricature. Forty cigarettes and two packs of Rennies a day and every night when I made it back home I would have two treble gins down my neck before I got my coat off. We had a family business back then and my fourteen hours a day were all about ducking and diving my around two million quid's worth of debt. Not a bunch of laughs I can assure you.

All of which made the sudden lancing pain in my chest pretty ominous, though not entirely unexpected. Decision time. I could pull up on the hard shoulder and dail 999. Or I could throw the dice and try to make it home.

I threw the dice and made it home.

An hour or so later I was wired up like Frankenstein's monster in the ICU unit of Blackburn infirmary.

Eventually a laconic consultant pitched up at my bedside and started hitting me with a series of lifestyle questions.

"Do you smoke?"

"Well. Yes and no."

"That's an odd answer."

"I know. Yes, as in I have smoked 40 a day for years. No, as in I gave up three days ago."

This induced a wry smile. "Ahh. I dare say you will have been coughing up all kinds of stuff, right?"

"Totally. I always do when I give up."

"Well. That's the problem."

He then went on to explain the precise nature of my problem. All the gunk I had been coughing up for three days had hitherto provided the walls of my lungs with a protective lining. The sudden lack of gunk had left my lungs exposed and had therefore given a few billion pesky pneumonia virus cells the chance to burrow themselves in.

"So I've got pneumonia?"

"You have."

"And if I hadn't given up smoking I wouldn't have pneumonia?"

This tickled him pink. "Nope. So what are you going to do? You know. With the smoking?"

A no brainer. "Start again of course."

"Thought so. Just have a word with the nurses. They all smoke. They'll show you where to go."

Things were different in NHS back then!

And they did indeed show me where to go and it turned out the ICU unit of Blackburn infirmary was home to several handy nooks and crannies where a patient could sneak a crafty fag.

When the Covid 19 crisis started to escalate a few weeks ago, someone asked me if I was going to have a go at giving up smoking. As a precation. As a sensible thing to do. The idea made me chuckle in much the same way my consultant had chuckled all those years ago.

No thank you. I am more than happy to keep my lungs well and truly coated in protective gunk. And I recounted my very formative experience from way back when.

All of which brings me to a Guardian article I read the other day which put a smile on my face which has barely moved since.

Here are the bones of it. A French doctor took a look at the statistics pertaining to 380 guys who had been admitted to his Paris hospital for treatment for Covid 19.

They had an average age of 65.

4.4% were regular smokers.

Hang on a sec here. 4.4%? That seems kind of low. What is the percentage of French guys of 65 who regularly smoke?

In a nutshell, way way more. 40% of guys in their 40's and 50's. 12% for the over 65's.

But surely this couldn't be right? Smoking damages the lungs, right? We see gruesome pictures of mashed up lungs on our cigarette packets. So surely smokers should be more likely to be admitted to ICU for emergency Covid 19 treatment, not less likely. Surely?

So my man got on the phone to China and asked doctors out there to check their stats.

Bloody hell.

Same story.

12.8% of Chinese Covid patients were smokers. 28% of the Chinese population smoke.

Next up the Doc took a look at the whole of Paris. Ooops.

11,000 patients admitted into the capital's hospitals for Covid 19. 8.5% were smokers.

25.4% of the French population smoke.

Which brings us to the why. They reckon there might well be a couple of reasons. It seems there is something in cigarettes which makes it harder for the Covid to break its way into our cells. It also seems there is something which calms the huge overreaction of our immune systems to the presence of Covid 19 which as often or not is the thing which kills us.

So where next? Well the French are gearing up to issue doctors, nurses and patients with nicotine patches and no doubt they must be praying it is indeed nicotine which is offering such protection. Because if it isn't nicotine, then it is something which requires actual smoking.

What a nightmare for the health gurus who have spent so many years lecturing the likes of me for our craven wickedness.

The last couple of paragraphs of th article really whacked me across the head.

“Our cross-sectional study strongly suggests that those who smoke every day are much less likely to develop a symptomatic or severe infection with Sars-CoV-2 compared with the general population,” the Pitié-Salpêtrière report authors wrote.

“The effect is significant. It divides the risk by five for ambulatory patients and by four for those admitted to hospital. We rarely see this in medicine,” it added.

We very rarely se this in medicine. Bloody hell!

Wow. Basically smoking every day makes you between 4 and 5 times less likely to become a Covid 19 victim.

All of which brings me to some pretty interesting thoughts.

It looks pretty much nailed on that smoking greatly increases our chances of avoiding death by Covid 19. Amazing but almost certainly true.

When all is said and done, it is entirely legal for anyone who is over 18 to go into a shop and buy themselves a packet of fags.

And it is entirely legal for the shop to sell them.

Which means a life saving product is readily available in the required numbers for each and every one of us. If the French studies stand up what seems pretty much nailed on, then right know we can probably reduce the number of Covid 19 deaths dramatically.

So what will our leaders do about it?

There's the question. Picture Nicola Sturgeon doing her daily Covid 19 thing. I guess it would have to go something like this.

"I am going have to make an announcement today which I really, really don't want to make. But I am the First Minister of Scotland and it my job to save Scottish lives, even though doing so can feel uncomfortable. I won't beat about the bush. Research from China and France shows that people who smoke every day are between four and five times less likely to succumb to Covid 19 than those who don't smoke. Astonishing, but true. Well desperate times require desperate measure and these are indeed truly desperate times. So as your First Minister, I must recommend all of you to smoke at least five cigarettes every day. This of course is harmful in the long term and we all must give up as soon once the current crisis passes. But in the short term, those five cigarettes might very well save your life. I am sure you will understand these are words I never thought I would say. But I promised to treat the people of Scotland as grown ups and as grown ups we all have the legal right to go to a shop and buy cigarettes or tobacco. It is time for each and every one of us to make a grown up decision."

Can you imagine it? I certainly can't. It would be just too much. Something tells me our leaders would rather see hundreds of us die every day rather than admit to the fact that fags are the unexpected magic bullet which can help to save us. If it was milk or sun dried tomatoes or kale which provided the surprise armour they would be queueing up to shout the news from the rooftops. But not fags. Not a chance. 

What an utterly, utterly weird world we live in.

By the way, here is the link to the story of you suspect this blog to be tad far fetched. Have a read and make your own mind up.

THE GUARDIAN STORY

A few hours later

I emailed the link to this blog to Ewen, the surgeon who fixed up my ear a few years ago and who is now my proof reader. This is his reply. I think it is fair to say he isn't as enthusiastic about the French research as I am!

Hi Mark

As the saying goes, numbers don't lie, but they don't always tell the whole story. Perhaps the smokers are so short of breath that they don't go out much - self isolation.

Perhaps smoking has already killed off those with a "weaker constitution" so that the remaining 65+ smokers are better able to fight off infections - survival of the fittest. Consider sickle-cell disease; it confers a certain amount of resistance to malaria, which would seem to be a good thing. But then consider the bouts of agonising pains that sicklers get; it turns out that the red blood cells are so damaged that the malaria parasites don't want to infect them. Malaria can be cured, sickle cell disease can't.

So could your Covid/smoking stats be telling a similar story? That smoking is a condition that gives resistance to one single problem (Covid) at the risk of many others,  e.g. COAD, lung (and other) cancers, arterial disease causing loss of limbs, strokes, heart attacks, dementia and all the rest? I think I'll take my chances with CoVid.

Feel free to copy this on your blog if you want to.