Organization, W.H. (2020). Smoking and COVID-19: Scientific brief.

[online]
JSTOR. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep28189.

"Smoking and COVID-19 Scientific Brief" is issued by the World Health Organization (WHO).

WHO is the United Nations agency that connects nations, partners and people to promote health,

keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable – so everyone, everywhere can attain the highest

level of health. The WHO is an expert in many areas of global health, including public health,

medicine, epidemiology, and health policy. The organization guarantees a thorough and

authoritative approach to health issues by assembling a diverse team of professionals, including

doctors, scientists, researchers, and public health specialists. With its main office in Geneva,

Switzerland, the World Health Organization has operations all over the world. WHO can address

health issues globally thanks to its regional offices and country offices across the globe in

addition to its headquarters. A wide range of publications are regularly released by the World

Health Organization. For example, WHO publishes in-depth reports on global health issues in

addition to scientific briefs. An important illustration of this is the "World Health Report," a

yearly publication that discusses important global health issues. Health systems, non-

communicable diseases, infectious diseases, and health equity are among the subjects these

reports frequently address. The academic and policy worlds frequently reference the publications

of WHO, including scientific briefs. For instance, the WHO's yearly "Global Tuberculosis

Report" is frequently referenced in studies and policy papers concerning the prevention and

control of tuberculosis including the study the review entitled “Multidrug resistant tuberculosis:

trends and control” by Prasad et.al (2014). The research's main goal is to review and evaluate the

body of peer-reviewed research that has been done on the topic of smoking and COVID-19. The

primary goal of the author's discourse is to shed light on the connection between smoking and
COVID-19 outcomes, with a focus on smokers' increased risk of infection, need for

hospitalization, and disease severity. The text includes references to 34 peer-reviewed studies,

eight meta-analyses, and statistical data from multiple resources, offering a comprehensive

review. It depends on the presentation of statistical data, study findings, and meta-analysis results

to support the narrative even though it lacks visual components like diagrams and graphs. The

content has been restricted by the author to a particular area of interest, namely the correlation

between smoking and the COVID-19 outcomes of hospitalization, infection risk, and severity.

however, to provide a more thorough understanding of the effect of smoking on COVID-19,

more outcomes could have been investigated including mortality rates, disease progression and

long-term effects of COVID-19 on smokers. Additional information on specific study

methodologies including population-based studies, potential biases, and the study context could

improve the analysis's depth for a more thorough understanding. Furthermore, the text provides

transparency regarding the limitations of the review by acknowledging potential biases in

hospital-based studies as well as limitations in the quality of the data. The "Smoking and

COVID-19 Scientific Brief" by the World Health Organization (WHO) was published in June

2020 and is considered new. This research provides insights into the potential risks associated

with smoking in hospitalized COVID-19 patients based on the evidence that were present during

the review time. It has been used globally by researchers and has been a source for new

researchers during the COVID pandemic and has made additional changes after the pandemic.

With rapidly evolving nature of COVID-19 research, new studies and evidence have emerged

adding on to this review that have developed and improved recently.

The brief published by the WHO is available to all who may want to access it online and

includes a wide range of peoples and organizations. The language used does not involve a lot of
jargon, and it summarizes the main point in a way that a normal person can understand what it

means making it accessible to all people. The article specifically targeted heavy smokers as it

advised them to stop using tobacco given these well-established harms. The article also provides

information that could be used by governments all over the world that could help in forming

public health policies directed at helping raise awareness of the risk of smoking with Covid-19.

The article also attempts to raise awareness to the fact that there are still many aspects of this

relationship that have yet to be analyzed, it targets any researching bodies to further provide

information on the topic. This brief builds on existing information that is available and serves as

an update to the current available research studies and information about the link between covid-

19 and smoking. In creating this brief and ensuring that it is accurate, a total of 34 peer-reviewed

articles were analyzed. In order to ensure these articles were reliable they were subject to a strict

inclusion criterion. 26 of the articles were observational studies while 8 were meta-analyses,

which demonstrates the use of multiple different sources to create an all-encompassing brief.

Some of the information also is logical as it uses our pre-existing knowledge about the harms of

smoking. One would expect a heavy smoker to be more at risk for severe Covid-19, and the brief

explains that many articles do in fact show a significant correlation between the two. The use of

multiple references with a specific inclusion criterion and the use of pre-existing information

gives the brief a reliable level of accuracy.