Regular smokers purchased fewer cigarettes during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic than they had previously, according to research.
"Everybody else was in the opposite direction, so this is awesome," Tindle, who was not involved in the latest work, said. She co-authored
If a shopper had purchased an average of at least one cigarette per day in 2019, researchers considered that person to be a regular smoker. Anyone with a lower average was an occasional smoker, and anyone who did not purchase cigarettes at all was a nonsmoker. By these standards, prior to the pandemic, 76% of the sample were nonsmokers, 16% were occasional smokers, and 8% were regular smokers, according to the researchers.
"Our story demonstrates the importance of purchase data that track people at the individual level prior to and through the pandemic," Sadoff said, noting that other studies of smoking behavior during the pandemic rely on self-reports, which may be less reliable. The researchers also compared how often regular smokers quit smoking altogether in 2019 and 2020 by identifying people who bought cigarettes in the first 10 weeks of either year but never bought them again during the rest of that year. Some people continued to purchase after that 10th week but eventually stopped; by halfway through 2020, 10% more regular smokers had stopped smoking than had done so before the pandemic.
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