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Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

mdpi.com

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Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#181

Post by alphabettsy »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #122
DevX101 wrote: post #79

Authors controlled for age, sex. But I'd like to see additional control for race. Black people have less Vitamin D due to melanin blocking sunlight. And black people are disproportionately impacted by COVID. So I'm now curious whether it's really Vitamin D deficiency that's causing the poor outcomes, or some racial socioeconomic factor that Vitamin D is simply a marker for.

> black people are disproportionately impacted by COVID. Serious question: I thought the African-America community in America was affected by COVID-19 disproportionately due to blacks being more likely to be having comorbidities. Is that not the case?

That was the case early on, but the demographics most affected are changing. There are probably many factors at play, but early on it was suggested that comorbidities and the higher proportion working in the service sector made black and Latino people overrepresented.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#182

Post by LordDragonfang »

nobody9999 wrote: post #171
TechBro8615 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIU you can’t donate blood if you’re gay. At least, I saw some segment on Anderson Cooper where he claimed that was the case.

>AFAIU you can’t donate blood if you’re gay. At least, I saw some segment on Anderson Cooper where he claimed that was the case. That's not actually true. There are some restrictions if you're a man who has sex with men, but you're certainly not permanently barred from giving blood. cf. https://nybloodcenter.org/donate-blood/become-donor/can-i-do...

So if you're in a committed, monogamous relationship where you have sex with your partner more than a couple of times a year, you're barred.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#183

Post by zrail »

shortandsweet wrote: post #149
pacaro wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't donate blood, for fairly bogus reasons, this is true for a surprisingly large subset of the population

What's the reason? Maybe not share it but double check that the reason is still valid. The criteria changes pretty frequently. They always need more blood.

If you have ever received chemo you’re barred for life, at least last time I checked.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#184

Post by untererdisch »

xenophonf wrote: post #81

MDPI follows an author-pays model, which incentivizes it to accept all submissions instead of publishing only good-quality work. In fact, this publisher is highly suspect, as it has allegedly pressured peer reviewers to accept low-quality work for publication in the recent past: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/open-access-editors-r... https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/be... I would trea…

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77093-z

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#185

Post by watwut »

1234throwaway wrote: post #145
peteretep wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“How coronavirus tore through Britain's ethnic minorities” https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52894225 “Socio-economic inequality means we're more likely to catch the virus, while our biology means we're more likely to die” Literally just the first link that 10s of Googling found. > from someone point internet out that certain skin types are not suited to certain environments That’s because this is a crassly overloaded dog…

But, without the recently invented therapeutics you mentioned (vitamin d supplements, sunscreen), people will have negative health outcomes from living in an environment they are not suited to. There is no need to get emotional here - just accept the scientific and natural fact that in the long term evolution means that people are highly A/B optimised for their environment - there is a reason why in nature there are…

1.) At this point, it is not "recently invented". It is long term known.

2.) Vitamin D deficiency is affecting you negatively, but not enough to claim that people are "living in an environment they are not suited to". That is absurdly exaggerated claim, especially given all the various reasons why people in history died.

3.) Racism is causing way more suffering then overall vitamin D deficiency.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#186

Post by techoeopi »

The first vitamin D study showed that it reduced severe disease load by 96% (that is, if 100 hospitalized people would have been promoted to the ICU, but you gave them all vitamin D on first admission, 96 of them would no longer have to go to the ICU)

Transmissability scales with disease severity; further, to a certain extent you could argue that making every disease a mild case would be the same as ending the disease (because oh no, you got a cold). Vitamin D supplementation, at about $10 every 3 months per person, would reduce that by 96%

Meanwhile, the best vaccine being developed is claiming a 90% efficacy rate. Which means that if 100 people get exposed to covid, but they are all vaccinated, only 90 of them wouldn't get sick.

Vitamin D turns 100 cases into 4 cases. Vaccine turns 100 cases into 10 cases. Vitamin D is ridiculously cheap. Vaccine development is not. But when the time comes, I'm going to use both.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#187

Post by newsbinator »

Ragib_Zaman wrote: post #13

I highly recommend watching this video: https://youtu.be/Kvh4D_osFXs Sunlight gives us vitamin D and nitric oxide (which improves blood flow and reduces hypertension). Vitamin D is crucial for the functioning of our immune systems, and the 1000IU dosage of many supplements is laughably small. A light skinned person in a singlet standing outside at noon for 30 minutes will produce between 10,000IU and 20,000IU in thei…

You really shouldn't recommend possibly-dangerous dosages of Vitamin D.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24738558

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#188

Post by legulere »

g42gregory wrote: post #120
xenophonf wrote: post #81

MDPI follows an author-pays model, which incentivizes it to accept all submissions instead of publishing only good-quality work. In fact, this publisher is highly suspect, as it has allegedly pressured peer reviewers to accept low-quality work for publication in the recent past: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/open-access-editors-r... https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/be... I would trea…

I think that easy and inexpensive treatment methods are getting very skeptical reception by the medical community. My sense is that this is the training from the medical school, which in turn, is influenced (to a degree of course) by the pharmaceutical companies.

I think it’s more about prescription drugs versus otc drugs.

Prescription drugs need a prescription because they have potentially dangerous side effects. Often you don’t get a wanted effect without potential side effects.

OTC drugs are usually extremely cheap (hence why you could think the medical community dislikes cheap medication). The fact that you don’t need a medical professional to get them makes them a target for the alternative medicine crowd.

In the end it’s also the fault of patients for simply asking for simple cures. My doctor uses every occasion to tell me that I should do more sports, but that would mean that I would actually need to put effort in my health.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#189

Post by mattmanser »

untererdisch wrote: post #184
xenophonf wrote: post #81

MDPI follows an author-pays model, which incentivizes it to accept all submissions instead of publishing only good-quality work. In fact, this publisher is highly suspect, as it has allegedly pressured peer reviewers to accept low-quality work for publication in the recent past: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/open-access-editors-r... https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/be... I would trea…

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77093-z

The fatality rate was high in vitamin D deficient (21% vs 3.1%).

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#190

Post by timkam »

jefft255 wrote: post #123
xenophonf wrote: post #81

MDPI follows an author-pays model, which incentivizes it to accept all submissions instead of publishing only good-quality work. In fact, this publisher is highly suspect, as it has allegedly pressured peer reviewers to accept low-quality work for publication in the recent past: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/open-access-editors-r... https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/be... I would trea…

MDPI also publishes some high quality work, in remote sensing serious labs do publish good work in their journals “Forests” and “Remote Sensing”. You are right to be skeptic, though. They have very lax review processes and will publish anything that looks like science because their incentives are screwed up. Pay-to-publish for-profit OA is just as bad as closed-access IMHO, and in some case it’s worse when the publis…

I somewhat agree, but many traditional publishers have an optional "pay for OA" model and more and more funding providers require OA. For journal publications, we (in the EU) almost always have to pay. However, MDPI is particularly aggressive in its editorial practices and marketing tactics. In my community, we sometimes publish "smaller" works there: when early-career researchers get to guest edit a special issue in an MDPI journal and we want to support them; i.e., we sometimes fall for MDPI's marketing tactics ;-)

It's best to have journals that are owned by the community, but these take time to grow into venues that administrators respect: we can publish some work there, but it's not enough for building a competitive academic CV.

Considering this article: it's just a comment, and to me it looks like something an expert can easily tear apart. A well-established researcher wouldn't publish such a comment in an MDPI journal (as one of the other comments suggests).

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