Smoking could definitely have an impact on whether people get the coronavirus and how fast they recover, experts say.

There’s little research on this yet, but there are some preliminary theories. A study of COVID-19 cases showed that smoking status was a factor in COVID-19 progression into pneumonia. And experts at the University of California, San Francisco, state that a potential reason that more men are dying than women of the disease in China is because more men than women smoke there.