Answer Bank: Are people who smoke cigarettes more at risk of COVID-19?

A study published on the medRxiv website found significantly higher ACE2 gene expression in former smoker's lungs compared to non-smoker's lungs, which means ACE2 may be a potential invasive receptor of SARS-CoV-2 and smokers may be more susceptible to the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19).  

Considering that SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-nCov share the same receptor, the study analyzed five large-scale bulk transcriptomic datasets of normal lung tissue and two single-cell transcriptomic datasets to investigate the disparities related to race, age, gender and smoking status in ACE2 gene expression and its distribution among cell types, and they found ACE2 gene expression is significantly higher.   

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