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.
This observation makes me more confident Vitamin D plays a role.
In any event, good to review studies for potential issues like this.
You'd be surprised. There might not be a lot of black people but Heidelberg is a university town and rather diverse. 27% are ethnic minorities, though only maybe 1% are black (4% Asian, 4% Russian/CIS, 3% southern Europe, 3% Turkey, 2% US-American, 2% Latin American, 2% Polish, 2% ex-Yugoslav)
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?
Only on America. You say it like it's the case in the whole world.
Isn't Africa doing surprisingly well?
Yeah, so this is a notable bit of nuance. Black people in Africa likely tend to get a bit more sun exposure compared to Black people in northern territories e.g. Europe, US, etc., so it wouldn't surprise me if Vitamin D deficiencies among Black people in the US and Europe are much more prevalent.
https://www.cooperinstitute.org/2019/09/24/african-americans...
Wouldn't surprise me if the same is true in southern India or other territories where melanin (genetic or otherwise) tracks with sun exposure.
Africa has dramatically lower rates of obesity, a younger population, less asthma, less air conditioning, and as a sibling comment notes, the people get more sun exposure, hence Vitamin D.
Everything we know to track with high mortality, Africa has less of. They also have very little testing, so the infection rate is unknown and somewhat irrelevant, since few people are ending up in hospitals and dying.
I've always wanted to ask someone personally: why is the fact that African nations haven't been overrun by COVID-19 surprising?
I mean, I live here and I'm certainly very pleased that we've had such positive outcomes. But the constant tone of surprise from foreigners was funny at first but is now mildly annoying if I'm being honest; not you, obviously, but I've read one too many op-eds that seem somewhat upset that we aren't dying in droves.
Even at that, using intensive care unit counts as the metric worth paying attention to in a public health crisis seems rather off; public health is and should be the domain of the community, not of the hospitals. To be fair, "how likely are people to do what they're supposed to to protect their communities" is far trickier to measure than just counting hospital beds.
Also, if the vitamin D angle holds, Africa is probably pretty well positioned on that front. I would REALLY like to see COVID ICU numbers in regions with a significant marine/fish diet versus others.
(Although, imho, nutritional science is largely opinionated guess work with no basis in reality but an incredible ability to sell books off it).
Although, speaking of which, it seems nearly certain to me that there could be an interaction between malaria [antibodies] and SARS-CoV2, but very few people indeed seem interested in researching that. Oh well