https://retractionwatch.com/2020/10/26/paper-suggesting-vita...
This isn't a home run yet, even though I would like to believe that Vitamin D has protective nature.
Generally speaking, I wouldn't expect much in the way of good results to give massive doses of vitamin D to people so sick they have been hospitalized with Covid-19. But I think there is plenty of evidence to suggest that a good recommendation is "If you are vitamin D deficient and would like to actually survive the pandemic, raising your vitamin D status is the smart thing to do."
I mean, you should do that anyway, even if there were no pandemic. It's just a hair more urgently life threatening at the moment.
It's sound advice generally to say "If you are vitamin D deficient, you should seek to remedy that." It's sound advice with or without a global pandemic happening around you.
You are inferring that I am recommending supplements as the means to redress this. I am not and have suggested otherwise elsewhere and, wow, has it gotten ridiculous levels of push back:
Please keep in mind that my point of view is probably not adequately expressed in a single internet comment. It boils down to: for best results, we should be generally trying to address vitamin D deficiency as a means to try to halt the pandemic and not waiting for people to end up hospitalized with Covid-19 before checking their status and trying to do something about it.
I'm not saying it's "useless" to give supplements at that point. I'm just saying I would expect vastly better results if you have more lead up time to redress the issue rather than waiting until you are deathly ill from the current pandemic before you think taking action makes sense.
(Please note - this is not a "show your sources" challenge, I'm genuinely trying to understand the recovery process from malnutrition better. My guess would have been that the malnutrition is quickly remedied, but the 2nd order damage might take longer. Is that what you meant, and I just misunderstood?
Scurvy is vitamin C deficiency. Vitamin C is water soluble.
Vitamin D is fat soluble. Fat soluble vitamins generally work on a longer, slower time scale. It takes longer to incorporate them into the body and longer to become deficient.
People who are deficient in vitamin C may simply not be getting enough of it in their diet. Because vitamin D can actually be manufactured in the body, it tends to correlate to other underlying issues.
People with other underlying issues tend to require more time to recover from anything, medically speaking. They may even have inherent challenges in absorbing vitamin D properly or using it properly.
I have a genetic disorder that predisposes me to deficiency in all fat soluble vitamins, including vitamin D. I'm sure my firsthand experience with being slow to heal and my body being slow to adequately resolve nutritional deficiencies (on the order of months of supplementation to fix things) is on the fairly extreme side, but most Covid-19 patients in danger of dying from it are elderly and have underlying health issues. So I would expect my experiences to be somewhat similar to their situation.
Does that make sense? Did I answer the question?
Or is it that fat soluble nature moderates how quickly we can release the molecule, which is why we can store too much and suffer harm?
But based on those stellar credentials, if I am understanding your question correctly, the answer is "both." It is both slower to access and also the reason you can wind up vitamin D toxic in a way that doesn't generally happen with water soluble vitamins.
You can get get too much of water soluble vitamins and they can do bad things to the body, but those bad things aren't described as "toxicity" because you don't build up excessive stores of them in the body like you can with fat soluble vitamins. Off the top of my head, some people who take way too much vitamin C end up harming their dental health by harming the tooth enamel and a certain B vitamin when taken in excess is associated with, iirc, kidney stones.
Rickets is most commonly caused by vitamin D deficiency. I suspect the comment which you replied to made an honest mistake confusing scurvy with rickets.
Most people treated for scurvy feel better within 48 hours and make a full recovery within 2 weeks.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/scurvy/
Most children with rickets see improvements in about one week.
Skeletal deformities will often improve or disappear over time if rickets is corrected while the child is still young. However, skeletal deformities can become permanent if the disorder isn’t treated during a child’s growth period.
https://www.healthline.com/health/rickets#outlook
A really quick look suggests rickets is much, much more serious than scurvy which fits with what I said above.