Why is COVID-19 affecting American teenagers worse than young people in other countries? I’m sure we’re all sick of emails reminding us that “these are difficult and unprecedented times…”, from Aerie spam to school updates, but it’s true. Even with outbreaks like Ebola and the swine-flu, we’ve never been required to have such an intense and pervasive lockdown. For a while, most Americans assumed– and were told– that COVID-19 would be nothing more than a mild cold or flu for many people. But initial reports have been revised since then, stating that the elderly are not the only ones at risk for hospitalization due to the coronavirus. So, what gives?
COVID-19 is short for SARS-Cov-2, which is shorthand for severe acute respiratory syndrome, caused by a coronavirus. This kind of virus causes pneumonia and many reports state that underlying illnesses and lung damage is one of the biggest predictors of mortality rate.
One clear common denominator in severe cases of the virus is lung damage. The percentages of teenagers and young adults who smoke tobacco and drink alcohol have dropped significantly since 2000 but the percentage of teens who smoke weed or think that smoking is not “very risky” has increased in the past ten years. On one hand, a lot of the social stigma around weed has indeed evolved from racist sentiments in the Reagan and Nixon administrations; minorities were specifically targeted with policies that criminalized the use of cocaine and marijuana.
While this is obviously a huge problem that still persists today, one can agree that smoking isn’t good for your lungs, period. When you burn something, you’re chemically combusting elements, which creates carcinogens. According to the American Lung Association, “smoke from marijuana combustion has been shown to contain many of the same toxins, irritants and carcinogens as tobacco smoke.”
Inhalants, in general, aren’t good for your lungs. The CDC released a similar statement about e-cigarettes, stating that the use of vitamin E acetate in “vape juice” was linked to many cases of lung damage. While the FDA has chosen not to officially regulate vapes beyond looking into those products, it has released a statement saying that the organization is continuing to gather more data.
That means vaping is the longest running, non-regulated, epidemiological study in the U.S to have ever occurred. High schooler’s lungs may as well be petri dishes, because while the FDA doesn’t want a significant portion of teenagers to be vaping, they’re also curious about the long-term effects of vapor nicotine.
That means it’s a great time to quit. While it’s clear that many people benefit from new electronic nicotine devices (i.e, former or quitting smokers), it’s also clear that it’s gotten a new population hooked. At best, we don’t know the long term effects of vaping. At worst, we have a
population with vulnerable lungs stuck in quarantine until essentially, we find a cure or vaccine. New reports say that might not be until 2022. To hear more about quitting, visit https://truthinitiative.org/thisisquitting.