The growing evidence on Vitamin D and Covid

The only paper I see referenced talking about the vitamin D-COVID link is [0]. It doesn't look too polished, and the methodology seems a bit lacking - I'm not a professional though, so if someone is please correct me. Assuming the paper is solid, it is one study on <5000 people, where only 499 even had information about their vitamin D levels.

The article itself only really talks about this connection in a single paragraph, the rest of it dedicated to general issues around vitamin D deficiencies - I don't personally know how big a problem this actually is, but the fact that 1 small paper said it helps with COVID isn't a reason for it to now be "shouted from the rooftops".

In the sentence following this advice, a different (published) paper is referenced [1]: "A new article by a long list of medical experts in the BMJ cautiously agrees", but as they then quote, the only result that paper gives in reference to COVID is that stay-at-home orders may increase vitamin D deficiencies. Though not outright malicious, to me it read like the article was trying to gain credibility by quoting a published paper which talks about vitamin D and COVID together, even if unrelated to a possible vitamin D-COVID connection. Though this might just be me.

Either way, I don't see this "growing evidence" from the article - if it was titled different, and only mentioned [0] in passing (but even better, not at all), I'd have less of a problem with it, but it's implying that a link between vitamin D deficiency and COVID is there and is significant, when both these things are pretty much still unknown.

[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.08.20095893v...

[1] https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/bmjnph/early/2020/05/13/bm...