Aleksandra Jankauskas, a 19-year-old Kyiv native, is an avid hookah smoker like many Ukrainians of her age. However, she is worried that this social component of her Friday evenings may not be possible in the post-pandemic era.
Smoking hookah, or kalyan as it’s often called in Ukraine, is usually a group activity that involves inhaling flavored tobacco smoke via a waterpipe and then sharing it with others, a risky lifestyle as the world tries to curb the spread of COVID-19, an airborne disease.
Based on a recent market report conducted by market research company Pro-Consulting, at least one in four adult Ukrainians smoke hookah regularly or have tried it at least once.
“I don’t remember the last time I went out with friends without smoking hookah,” says Denys Khomenko, a sophomore university student in Kyiv. “Shisha helps break the ice in group conversations. We laugh, we smoke, and usually we play some sort of board game.”
Kyiv alone hosts over 70 establishments that explicitly call themselves “hookah lounges” in addition to restaurants and cafes that offer hookah as an additional service. And most of them have fully reopened following a new set of quarantine rules released by the Cabinet of Ministers on June 22.
The guidelines, however, make no attempt to address the notion of hookah smoking, leaving restaurant and hookah venue managers oblivious about how to proceed. Medical experts and anti-tobacco groups, meanwhile, sound the alarm, asking to abstain from smoking shishas in public.
Hookah venues continue to meet demand regardless, but some Ukrainians like Jankauskas aren’t convinced that it’s safe anymore.
“I was honestly scared to smoke hookah when they opened terraces in May. I didn’t know whether I could trust restaurants here or how dangerous it was,” Jankauskas says and adds that she has decided to buy her own hookah and smoke at home.
Medical concerns
Although the novel coronavirus has opened a pandora box of fresh concerns regarding hookah smoking, many of the problems have existed long before the pandemic.
Former Acting Minister of Health, Ulana Suprun, claims that hookah is more dangerous than cigarettes and is a source of many viral infections.
“One hour of smoking is equivalent to 100 cigarettes in terms of damage caused to a human body,” Suprun writes on her webpage. “This is because a cigarette smoker inhales 0.6 liters of smoke per cigarette while a hookah smoker inhales 74.1 liters of smoke after one session.”
Furthermore, hookah smoke is classified as a source of carcinogens and other harmful toxicants by the World Health Organization (WHO).
But during the pandemic, the health risks of smoking a shisha have significantly increased, says Vladyslav Denysenko, a pulmonologist and tuberculosis specialist at patient-led organization CO 100% Life.
According to Denysenko, hookah smoking results in structural changes of the respiratory tracts, disrupts the function of protective body cells and decreases the production of antibodies — all leading to greater susceptibility to COVID-19.
According to a WHO study in China, the progression of pneumonia, a respiratory disease associated with coronavirus, occurred 14 times more often amongst all types of smokers as opposed to people who do not smoke on a regular basis.
The medical expert further confirmed the growing concern over hookah’s status as a potential source of COVID-19 transmission, but admitted that the full effect smoking has on contracting COVID-19 is still being researched.
Since the smoking of hookah is usually done in groups, a breathable aerosol carrying the virus can be easily passed on to the other smokers, explains Denysenko. He points out that this happens regardless of safety precautions like using individual mouthpieces and hoses, a recommendation from the WHO.
Passive smokers may contract the disease too, as the virus may spread through aerosols accumulated in the air, more so in places with poor ventilation.
Official statement from the WHO encourages a complete ban on the use of waterpipes in all public venues, including cafes, bars and restaurants.
Home to a vibrant hookah lifestyle and hotspots of shisha lounges, large cities like Cairo, Abu Dhabi and Dubai have completely banned the use of shisha in public places when the pandemic started in order to slow down the spread of the coronavirus.
Konstantin Kraskovksy, director of the Ukrainian Center for Tobacco Control, believes Ukraine should follow suit.
No regulations
Contrary to Kraskovsky’s convictions, most shisha lounges and restaurants, which survived the lockdown measures introduced in Ukraine in mid-March, have returned to normalcy after the government’s decision to fully re-open cafes and restaurants in late June.
On June 22, the Kyiv City Administration released a document featuring a list of new regulations for the functioning of restaurants during the quarantine. The set of instructions, however, failed to mention anything about hookah venues and how to regulate them.
This is a huge oversight by the government, according to Glib Kolesov, a lawyer at the Centre for Democracy and the Rule of Law. He says the quarantine resolution by the Cabinet of Ministers fails to address the industry at all.
“Likewise, we did not see the needed recommendations or warnings from the Ministry of Health and the State Service of Ukraine on Food Safety and Consumer Protection,” he says.
Hryhoriy Diezov, the brand chef of Fog Factory, a restaurant and shisha lounge in central Kyiv, says he was personally approached by tens of other shisha lounge owners clueless as to how to behave.
“People would be sending me a plethora of information from the most random information portals,” he says. “But about hookah — not a word. Silence.”
Diezov, like countless of others restaurateurs, is left at the mercy of what he calls “our dear Orthodox bureaucracy.” The government’s lack of provision for hookah operations during COVID-19 means that it’s up to restaurant managers to decide how they want to operate.
“We did not receive separate rules or mandatory obligations that went along with the updated quarantine legislation,” says Elena Dunaeva, marketing director of the Godz hookah bar. “However, this gave us the opportunity to enforce our own rules as well as tighten existing ones.”
Adjustments by hookah lounges
Without guidelines from the government and under the magnifying glass of anti-tobacco activists, shisha lounges were forced to adjust by their own means.
When asked what changed during their approach to clients in light of coronavirus, the response of Fog Factory’s brand chef Diezov was stunningly simple: “Nothing.”
Diezov claims that even before the pandemic, his hookah place adhered to strict hygiene standards.
“We are following the same sanitary protocol we followed before coronavirus,” says Diezov as he takes a puff of Fog Factory’s signature hookah. “After all, there have always been… viruses that can spread easily via hookah and we have to protect our guests from that.”
Hryhoriy Diezov, the brand director of Fog Factory lounge, smokes hookah indoors on Sept. 3, 2020.
“Ever since our opening three years ago, I personally nagged and monitored our hookah (servers) to clean and disinfect every hookah they touched. Back then, I was ridiculed for this approach, people told me it was unnecessarily expensive. Now, steam vaporizing and washing techniques are in the mainstream.”
To avoid contact with the shisha between the server who prepares the hookah and the client, everything is prepared on a separate “warm-up” shisha and then a clean pipe and shaft are given to the client, Diezov adds.
Similarly, Dunaeva claims the Godz hookah bar steams and disinfects the pipe and hookah shaft after each visitor.
Many skeptics, including Denysenko, heavily question the idea that all or even most shisha lounges adhere to such strict hygiene protocols.
“The proper disinfection of a hookah is quite difficult and requires extra resources, which, as far as I’m concerned, is not really being fulfilled here in Kyiv,” says Denysenko. “The maximum compliance here involves the handing out of individual mouthpieces and individual pipes.”
According to both hookah establishments, Godz and Fog Factory, the amount of inquiries made by the clients as to “how the hookahs are being disinfected” has increased. Diezov calls this a “positive” development and believes that clients should continue to put pressure on hookah establishments, especially if the government does not.
Stay at home hookah
Online shops that sell hookahs and complementing accessories are true winners of the quarantine restrictions. Smoky Panda, an online hookah shop that offers deliveries around Ukraine, has seen approximately a 25% increase in sales following the lockdown measures introduced in mid-March: before the lockdown they sold on average 30 hookahs per day while during the quarantine it went to 38 per day.
The spike in demand lasted for about two weeks, according to the online shop.
“Many habitual customers of shisha lounges stopped smoking in public places because they could simply enjoy shisha at home,” said Denys Sokyra, a manager at Smoky Panda. “They could invite their friends over and enjoy the new stay-at-home relaxing culture that gained popularity during the pandemic.”
This is exactly what Jankauskas decided to do.
“I decided to buy my own hookah and invite my friends to a summerhouse for the weekend,” she says. “It seemed like the best alternative and the only way I would feel comfortable enjoying hookah during the pandemic.”
