Clinical symptoms of COVID-19 among tobacco users in Moradabad city, India: A retrospective observational study

Background: tobacco is one of the leading risk factors for many respiratory infections and is linked to the clinical severity of the disease. covid-19 primarily infects the lungs and causes severe pneumonia-like illness. tobacco consumption may thus, increase the risk for developing covid-19. however, this study was planned to assess the tobacco consumption among covid-19 patients and determine the relationship between sars cov-2 and tobacco use among covid-19 patients.methods: lists of laboratory-confirmed covid-19 positive patients aged 18-70 years were obtained from district government hospital on november 2020 and were interviewed telephonically after taking informed consent. a total of 470 patients under home isolation for the past one month after getting diagnosed with sars cov-2 were recruited in this study. data was entered in ms excel 2019 (microsoft corp.) and analysis was done using spss 25 (ibm inc.). chi-square and fisher’s exact test were used and significance level was set 0.05 with 95% confidence interval. results: in the present study, the mean (standard deviation) age of participants was 37.8 (12.1) years. among the covid-19 patients, 21% of participants were tobacco users. clinical symptoms such as fever, severe acute respiratory illness (sari), acute respiratory illness (ari), loss of taste/smell, and other symptoms such as body-ache, myalgia, nasal secretion and flu like symptoms were presented; of which most common symptoms were fever (26.8%) followed by sari or ari (11.5%) and significantly presented more among tobacco users (66.3%) than non-tobacco users (55.6%) (p = 0.036). nonetheless smokers, these symptoms also affected significantly slt users (64.8%) (p = 0.029) and dual tobacco users (100%) (p = 0.010). conclusion: tobacco use may worsen covid-19 disease symptoms among covid-19 patients.