WEDNESDAY, March 25, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Smokers and vapers who get COVID-19 can probably expect a more severe infection, health experts warn.

Many advisories have focused on the risk facing older people, those with chronic conditions such as diabetes, and people with compromised immune systems, such as cancer patients. But doctors also caution that users of electronic cigarettes and tobacco are more in danger from the new coronavirus than the average healthy person.

If you vape, "you're going to make lungs more vulnerable to severe infection," said Dr. Panagis Galiatsatos, an American Lung Association spokesman who is also director of the tobacco treatment clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore.

Vaping introduces toxic chemicals that harm lung cells and change their metabolism, Galiatsatos said, and it also curbs the body's immune system.

Data from China's coronavirus outbreak showed infected smokers and residents of cities with high levels of air pollution had more severe symptoms, he said. Galiatsatos predicted use of e-cigarettes will have the same effect.

A study of 78 patients with COVID-19 pneumonia in Wuhan, China, published recently in the Chinese Medical Journal, listed history of smoking as one factor contributing to poorer patient outcomes.

Stanton Glantz, director of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, cited that study in a recent online UCSF commentary.

"The odds of disease progression (including to death) were 14 times higher among people with a history of smoking," he wrote, calling on the public to stop smoking and vaping, and to also steer clear of secondhand smoke.

Because vaping is a recent phenomenon, less is known about its harmful long-term effects than about smoking tobacco, which has been studied for decades.

But e-cigarettes have come under growing scrutiny since last year when more than 2,000 cases of severe lung damage and death were reported among vapers. Most of those cases were associated with products containing an additive called vitamin E acetate, and THC, the psychoactive component of marijuana, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.