Survey: 1M in UK have quit smoking during pandemic

More than 1 million people in the U.K. are estimated to have quit smoking over the past four months during the coronavirus pandemic, with younger people kicking the habit at a higher rate than older smokers, a new analysis shows.

And 440,000 people in the country have also used the pandemic as an opportunity to try to quit, according to the analysis by the organization Action on Smoking and Health and University College London, which used a YouGov survey of more than 10,000 people as the basis of their findings.

The campaign calls on older smokers in particular to take the pandemic as an opportunity to quit, as COVID-19 appears to be generally more severe in older patients. People in the 16-29 age group have quit smoking at more than twice the rate of smokers over the age of 50.

The U.K. government has advised that smokers could be at higher risk of suffering severe symptoms associated with COVID-19. The science on the different impacts on smokers and nonsmokers, however, is not yet conclusive.

Smoking is the leading cause of preventable illness, causing cancer, heart and lung disease. ASH said in a news release Wednesday that smokers who are hospitalized with COVID-19 are more likely to suffer severe outcomes than nonsmokers.

Dr. Sarah Jackson, a senior research fellow at UCL’s Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group, cautioned that the findings relate only to quitting in the short term.

“Given that the rate of long-term success in quitting tends to be low, this is very unlikely to translate to a million fewer smokers in the U.K., which would be a large decline in prevalence,” she said.