Coronavirus Causes Damaging Blood Clots from Brain to Toes

For many people diet/sunlight is insufficient - there's a host of cofactors and things that probably play a role in this. I'm not too sure on just how effective supplements are but I've personally used them to raise my serum D levels with success.

They can be, but the oral absorption pathways are complicated. You need to be sufficient in other vitamins, I can’t remember which, in order to absorb vitamin D from your food.

Generally it’s recommended that sun > supplements, for a few reasons. But if you can’t get some sunlight supplements are not a bad choice at all.

I believe Vit K deficiency is less common than Vit D deficiency

Yep. K2 MK7 specifically. Cheese (most) and natto are good dietary sources of K2. The better D3 supps are formulated with an optimal D3 to K2 ratio.

There's also a connection with magnesium.

https://www.livescience.com/61866-magnesium-vitamin-d.html

Vitamin K also increases risk of blood clots. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/vitamin-k-can-dangerous-t...

vitamin K deficiency is also associated with covid19 symptoms.

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202004.0457/v1

How do you get to that conclusion from that paper?

All I see from that paper is that there is "no evidence" that Vitamin D is beneficial with COVID-19 (and some qualified evidence that it may help other respiratory infections).

They mentions several planned/registered studies on the question, but none that have reported results yet.

I'm glad someone has looked into but it doesn't confirm or deny much. They were -measuring mortality- against those already infected and those "instituionalized but asymptomatic". It doesn't seem to say anything about making symptoms milder for those that contracted covid-19 after taking supplements or for those who have already contracted, which is what I think OP was suggesting.

That’s calling out a lack of formal trials providing evidence, not discrediting the data that is emerging.

Either way, they still recommend supplementing if deficient(which the numbers for people with IVD are quite high in most regions).

Yes but the population of Island (364K) is way less than many other countries, so it's much easier to control the disease.

To put things in perspective, the US population is 328M.

Iceland is also far less densely populated

"Stay home, stay safe" only works if the other people in your home stay home too. It's not surprising people get infected indoors - one sick person in a household, office building, or restaurant will infect those nearby. You're far less likely to get it from a random passerby on the sidewalk, as your exposure time is much more limited.

Once someone gets mauled by a pack of roaming coronaviruses, give me a call. Until then, I think we can agree that coronavirus is more dangerous inside the body than outside.

My (armchair) assumption is that we are still learning.

I'm reminded of the film, "The Andromeda Strain" (1971) — such an intelligent movie. Still feels cogent almost 50 years later.

I'm confused about why everyone is surprised that something that elicits an inflammatory response in the body can increase your risk of blood clots. Increased inflammation -> increased clotting in a number of diseases, not limited to coronavirus. A quick literature search reveals that this is the case for a other viruses and autoimmune diseases.

This was a particularly enlightening paragraph from StatPearls: There is an interplay between inflammation and the coagulation system. Inflammation triggers a hypercoagulable state.[45] Endotoxin activates the complement system leading to thrombocytopenia and hypercoagulability.[46] The relation between inflammation and coagulation can be observed clinically in patients with purpura, vasculitis, and septic thromboembolism.[47][48] Coagulation helps to limit the expansion of infection, and some bacteria use fibrinolytic properties to oppose this response. Autoimmune diseases like systemic lupus erythematosus, immune thrombocytopenic purpura, polyarteritis nodosa, polymyositis, dermatomyositis, inflammatory bowel disease, and Behcet's syndrome increase the risk of thrombotic events.[49][50][51] The cytomegaly virus (CMV) has correlations to atherogenesis through a change of the cellular lipid metabolism and leukocyte adherence.[52]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK538251/

According to the literature I have read, there is no evidence that Its mutating rapidly, nor is there multiple distinct strands. The increase in strokes is real, but your risk if you are <60 years old of having one is still vanishingly small. We don’t know much about the virus, nor will we for a while. Knowing things is hard, science takes a long time. We still don’t fully understand many of the pathogens that have been around for all of our collective lifetimes, so you shouldn’t expect us to be able to fully characterize one that just showed up a few months ago. What we do know from places which have been hit very hard, like bergamot is that if you are less than 60 your chance of dying from the virus is about the same as that of your risk for dying in a year, which if you are young and don’t have co morbidities is a very small number.

There seems to be a through-line that the whole thing is related to clotting and coagulation. That basically it's not destroying lung tissue so much as preventing the blood from properly absorbing oxygen from the lungs.

I don't think it's mutating. I think it's just very novel, and also came with its own red herring in the form of the respiratory symptoms. Doctors treated the problem in front of them and assumed it was like other things they'd seen, when in reality that was just the tip of the iceberg. But it's reassuring to me to see discoveries being made and treatment evolving. I think the disease will become much less deadly long before we have a vaccine, just due to new discoveries in how to treat it.

15! There are some 2 million kids in New York. Surely you'll find more gruesome fates among some of them.

Without any meaningful context into which statements and observations like this are woven into, it's mostly counterproductive for the general public.

How about we treat side effects of alcohol drinking with the same urgency and publicity? We don't. I'm sure there is a lot happening in your body when you drink 4 beers. And you could write thousands of articles just like this right now with credible studies behind them about flying, drinking, sky diving, coffee, etc. And you could make them sound even more scary. None of which is taken seriously, because in the public there is no demand for it. Because those risks are just taken as a given for existing and participating.

But at the moment every little effect is being treated like world news. Casual medications advertised for on TV have more significant side effects.

well, it's Bloomberg citing one person only, it's not a scientific paper. I do find it quite worrying that when news gets hold of all kind of edge cases or special cases, with barely any scientific data to back it up (from COVID causes X, Y and Z) everyone has no issue with the scarce facts. When an actual antibody test or special cases (like the one from France with more scientific explanations and detailing how a guy who was swabbed in December got a positive result), we need to be careful as the science is not valid or there are serious doubts over minor statistical error.

If I may, I think the GP feels that this information is stress-inducing but not really actionable for those of us not in the medical field. I don't know if I agree with their stance that it shouldn't be shared, but I sympathize.