An Iraqi group enrolled 158 Covid patients, and gave half of them 10mg of Melatonin a day. All patients got "standard care", meaning they all got remdesivir, dexamethasone, and an anticoagulant, but some 82 lucky patients were randomly picked to get melatonin as well. The average age of participants was 56 and most of them were men (70%).

By Day 17 a quarter of the control group were suffering from blood clotting (or thrombosis), but only 11% of the melatonin group were, or half as many.

By Day 11, eight patients in the control group had developed sepsis. Only two patients taking melatonin did. Sepsis is a systemic condition where basic things like blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature are running awry, and things are getting out of control. By Day 17, a third of the control group had sepsis, but only 8% of controls the test group with melatonin did. It's the kind of condition that kills people.

Indeed mortality in the melatonin group was 1%, but in the control group it was 17%. These study numbers are small, but no one needs to do a Chi Squared test to see if that's significant.  (p=0.001) All up, thirteen people died in the group that didn't get melatonin, but only one person died in the group that did.

The authors (Hasnan et al) stay very calm and merely conclude, Adjuvant use of Melatonin may help reduce thrombosis, sepsis, and mortality in COVID-19 patients. 

I feel a bit sorry for the unlucky sods in the control group. But in reality, I feel sorry for all of us. Many of the aspects of melatonin that make it appealing as a potential helper against Covid have been known for a long time. Melatonin is not just a sleepy-hormone, it's also anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, anti-viral and immunomodulatory. Yet here we are, discussing tiny Iraqi studies 23 months into a global pandemic because there aren't large controlled studies of tens of thousands of people in the West.