My anecdote on CBD and covid is not data, famously, but here it is anyway.
I've had covid, twice.
I first caught it in March, and was severely ill (as was my partner) but opted against the hospital because well, the idea of potentially dying without seeing loved ones again wasn't too appealing. I also have too many dietary restrictions for the hospital to deal with, and slip ups with that cause significant... you guessed it... inflammation. Not what the doctor ordered when you're dealing with an dangerously inflammatory disease. At the time, we didn't really know anything about treating covid, so I felt we made the right decision to stay home.
Covid turned into long covid for both of us although thankfully she was a bit less ill than me, so at least one of us was able to care for us a bit. We were sick from March through to September.
Then just when we were starting to have confidence our recovery was more or less complete, we got reinfected (in October). It is now February and we're still sick: long covid again. The one blessing is that the second infection has been less intense, for both of us. Even so, covid can be terrifying and the blood clots and heart issues were a feature of this second round, just like the first. The main difference is that whilst March-April had us bed-ridden and sometimes unable to talk from exhaustion, this time I've been able to work 2-4 hours per day without too much trouble, through most of it. No comparison on the energy level side.
All this is a long preamble to getting to CBD. Many Australians stranded overseas because of covid have suffered a lot because of it, but we were lucky to be in a country where cannabis cultivation for personal use is decriminalised and a mate had finished growing a number of 1:1 THC to CBD ratio strains, and I had just finished making tinctures from them.
At first I thought they made covid worse because my symptoms actually declared themselves the night I took some, and my first experience of covid illness, fear and loathing, was mixed with feeling the effects of the tincture. Powerful psychological association was made, and was difficult to shake.
As a result, despite knowing it had anti-inflammatory effects, I didn't use CBD for the worst 2 months of illness. After all, it has complex effects on the immune system, and I had no way of knowing whether it reduced inflammation but possible also reduced my body's ability to mount an effective immune response against the new invader.
As long covid set it, I started tentatively experimenting with the various strains again, and found significant relief. I learned it was highly dose dependent. One strain, in sufficient quantities, was great at helping me sleep: sleep deprivation because of covid symptoms discomfort is a BIG factor, and I found my recovery curve steepened once I was getting proper nights of sleep. (That held true recently when they started saying melatonin was helpful).
Combining two particular strains had a great effect at reducing discomfort as well as lifting mood, which can be important after 8 months of sickness and not seeing much of the outside world.
In summary, I look back on everything since March 2020, and would not like to imagine where I would be now had I not had access to those tinctures. Physically as well as psychologically. I'm not surprised in the slightest that hospitals are catching on to CBD efficacy for covid, and I suspect IHL-675a with its efficacy profiles will do even better if our expectations of its safety are met. My only sadness is that I suspect THC has played a role for me too: the tinctures had roughly equal measures of both THC and CBD. And other terpenes may have played important roles as well. It became immediately apparent that all four tinctures were distinctly different, and mixed for different effects, despite having roughly the same ratio.
The 2nd recovery is ongoing. I'm doing ok. Like all of us, I'm looking forward to all of this being in the rearview mirror, and my partner and I like to focus on the blessing of being survivors, rather than the thought of what long term damage we might have.
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