Tobacco use and COVID-19 in Ghana: generating evidence to support policy and practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background The COVID-19 pandemic has affected over 45 million people and caused over a million deaths globally. Tobacco use, a threat to public health worldwide, increases the risk of developing severe COVID-19 disease and death. The hand-to-mouth action, smoking-induced lung diseases, and the sharing of tobacco products such as water pipes, increase a smoker’s vulnerability to COVID-19. Implementation of tobacco control efforts in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) including sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is a particular challenge. The aim of this study in Ghana was to produce evidence to support governments to make informed policy decisions about tobacco control interventions in the context of COVID-19. Methods A survey with key stakeholders (conducted online or via face to face interview) and a desk-based mapping of data sources including government reports and online print press. Face-to Face interviews followed the COVID-19 precautionary protocols. Results 40 stakeholders participated in the interviews (28 online and 12 face-to-face). 46 data sources were identified from the mapping of which 16 were eligible for data extraction. Over two fifths of survey respondents (42.9%, n=12) agreed that the relationship between COVID-19 and tobacco use had been discussed in the media, and over half (57%, n=16) reported that public health professionals and other authorities had provided advice to tobacco users during the pandemic. While respondents (89%, n=25) did not see a change in the level of interest in tobacco cessation, less than a quarter (23%, n=6) indicated that the policy response to COVID-19 included a focus on tobacco control issues, but was limited to tobacco cessation. The majority of respondents (77%, n=31) reported a perceived limited impact on the tobacco industry’s operations during the pandemic. Conclusions COVID-19 provides a timely opportunity to strengthen tobacco control efforts by recognizing the role of tobacco use in potentially exacerbating covid-19 health outcomes and promoting cessation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.065 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".