Does anyone else remember the “epidemic” of lung damage due to vaping that was in the news towards the end of last year?
How many of the coronavirus casualties were vapers? (I read smokers are considered a higher risk, and “a lot” of Chinese males are smokers, but how about vaping?) Could the coronavirus be a “bad cold” that is particularly bad for vapers? And when did the technology to gene sequence a virus start being used to track infections? Could the panic be due to a confluence of a specific virus identification technology being newly available, and also a new type of lung damage from vaping starting to pop up?
Hubei province is notoriously polluted, and air pollution is associated with respiratory deaths, but there doesn’t seem to have been a sudden collapse in the death rate now that infection has escaped to other parts of the world. France is at 2 out or 18?
Specific virus identification has come a long way in the last 50 years. It used to be that people just died from unidentified respiratory diseases, and yes, with an infection number of 80,000, COV-19 might not have even registered 50 years ago. Legionnaires disease wasn’t a thing until they identified the responsible pathogen.
Vaping is normally not as hot as smoking, and doesn’t burn you as much, so as a generalization, it is expected to have less effect on your susceptibility to colds.
The lung damage from vaping was strongly correlated to vitamin E acetate, used as an additive in many unbranded vaping products.
Covid-19 isn’t “a bad cold” and it doesn’t appear to be related to vaping. The most susceptible are the very old and very young, who probably aren’t heavy vapers.
The NYT says the very young are particularly NOT susceptible to coronavirus:
Do you have a source which says otherwise?
And I just found an article showing “vaping lung disease” has a fatality rate of 39/2000=0.0195 (they say “more than 2000” and “at least 39”, but I assume the numbers are close):
I did a search and found absolutely nothing that correlates coronavirus and vapers.
As Telemark noted, the CDCfound that Vitamin E acetate was the primary cause of the lung disease and now that it’s been eliminated the lung disease is dropping accordingly.
Kathleen Sebelius, former HHS Secretary, said we don’t know yet what groups coronavirus is targeting so it is conceivable that a connection may yet be made. At this point, however, there’s no good reason to do so. Sounds too much like an internet conspiracy theory.
However, the difference between a flu and a bad cold is profound. They should never be confused.
Apologies for raising this point again, but I read somewhere that Young’uns and the old one are more likely prone to novel corona virus. So, is there any study suggesting probabilities of the virus in age-groups?
We need to distinguish between “prone to getting” and “prone to dying from”. I think, based on the NYT article, the young are prone to NOT die from the coronavirus. But is there a source saying otherwise?
The lung damage “epidemic” was not caused by nicotine e-cigarettes but by additives in black market THC devices. It was only in the USA; millions of vapers have been vaping e-cigs around the world for at least ten years.
The lung damage thing has nothing to do with vaping nicotine e-cigs. Just don’t buy THC from street corner sellers and flea markets.
The THC vapes were contaminated because concentrated THC is very expensive and the sellers diluted it to lower the price and to make it look like the thick THC. Nicotine is very inexpensive and looks thin and watery; it makes no sense to dilute it.
Please forget about vaping and Coronavirus. You are on the wrong track altogether.
Yeah, I could be on the wrong track, but I am learning a lot. Check out this:
The patient’s condition sounds like what you would expect from severe Coronavirus. Then they reveal vaping devices and additives (including vitamin E acetate) are made in China. It isn’t a stretch to imagine the factory workers were putting the various additives in the devices and trying it.
Severe pneumonia developing over weeks sounds like the Coronavirus to me. And in the article it is revealed the CDC thought what he had was contagious:
Well the article said he had a fever and cough. It did not say shortness of breath, but he had pneumonia, so he probably did and it was just not mentioned in the article. The severe cases of Coronavirus are said to result in pneumonia all over the news.
Everything is made in China, what is your point? Vitamin E acetate is not a toxic substance unless you vape it or deliver it into your lungs. Lots of things shouldn’t be going into your lungs. It’s readily available for sale here in the US. The people putting it into the THC vapes were mostly local dealers following a “formula” so the could maximize their profits by filling a demand for THC vapes, not some company in China trying to poison the world.
In June, vomiting and sweating after a workout. These are not coronavirus symptoms. Moreover, they appear to have vanished after the one incident. Again, not similar to coronavirus.
A cough developed in July. A cough is one symptom, true, but the accompanying symptoms were not present. Coughs, of course, can have a million different causes.
It was not until August 12 that he presented with truly serious symptoms, some of which did resemble those of coronavirus. But note the date. We’re not told when he traveled to China, just that it was June. That makes it 33 to 63 days earlier. (And his ailments progressed slowly while he was in the hospital, again not similar to severe coronavirus.)
Of course the doctors suspected as possibilities that he might have caught something contagious in China. But nothing about his individual case resembles anything we now know about coronavirus. Not to mention that he was in China in June, a full six months before the first cases were reported. And that we now know the actual cause of his lung problems, not a virus.
Cherrypicking a few words out a case to fit a previously-decided on disease is outright dangerous. If an actual doctor had done this, it would be malpractice. Fortunately for Doneson his actual doctors did nothing so foolish.
Even so, internet scaremongering and conspiracy theory fanning are to be avoided at all times, and more so when a crisis hits.