While many are trying to calm their nerves due to the coronavirus by smoking some pot, it may not be the best thing to do.
According to experts, smoking marijuana could make your lungs more susceptible to COVID-19. Many people who have sadly been hospitalized with coronavirus have underlying lung disease.
According to Dr. Barry J. Make, a pulmonologist at National Jewish Health, marijuana smokers particularly ones who combine cannabis with tobacco should be wary of their habits because of existing data on coronavirus patients in Italy and China.
“From China and Italy, we see people who developed COVID-19 and had underlying lung disease, [they] have more complications and die more often,” Make said. “So this is the perfect time to stop smoking.”
According to preliminary CDC data, chronic lung diseases including asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD, and emphysema, were common underlying conditions in hospitalized patients in the US.
The CDC analyzed 7,162 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases and found that 656 of them, or 9.2%, reported having a chronic lung condition.
Dr. Panagis Galiatsatos, a pulmonologist and national spokesperson for the American Lung Association, told Insider that smoking marijuana could also make a person’s COVID-19 symptoms worse compared to a non-smoker.
According to Galiatsatos, people who smoke marijuana regularly are more likely to experience severe COVID-19 symptoms because evidence suggests marijuana smoking can cause cells in the lungs to die.
“A good portion of the world will be infected by [the coronavirus], but the level of severity of symptoms is going to depend on so many variables, from genetic components to just your overall preexisting conditions,” Galiatsatos said.
“From my standpoint, meshing [together] all of the variables that put in things that are not air into your lungs, I would view them all kind of in the same category,” he said. “The best and most efficient data we have is about tobacco and its impact on COVID-19,” he said. “For e-cigarette and marijuana use, the data isn’t as robustly collected,” so right now marijuana should be put in the same category as tobacco in order to draw risk-related conclusions about the substance.