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Comment by Herodotus38 | Hacker News Reader

I have seen a lot of posts on vitamin D and Covid here. In this study, which was a multicenter, randomized, double blind placebo controlled study in Brazil, the researchers found no benefit in treating hospitalized patients with severe COVID with vitamin D3.

This study is helpful because it gives us evidence that if vitamin D deficiency is associated with severe disease, treating it at the time of hospitalization is not helpful and we can focus on other treatment options.

Note that this is a preprint which means it has been made available before final peer review.

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Yes. Most of the research I've seen (and I didn't go out of my way to do a proper review) seemed to indicate that the thinking was that Vitamin D was a prophylactic rather than a treatment. Or, perhaps more accurately, Vitamin D deficiency might be a risk factor for clinical infection.

I'd be interested, as fraught as studies invoking race are at the moment, in statistics around clinically significant COVID infection categorized by ancestral regions, as Vitamin D deficiency in polar and temperate zones are so strongly correlated with skin colour.

Vitamin D deficiency is a marker for one of several health conditions leaving people vulnerable to Covid. There is no reason to believe that this would work as a general treatment.

I agree. There is ongoing research into whether the correlation of low vit D is just the association with other comorbidities or whether there may be an independent risk to low levels.

I expect additional studies to result in the coming months that will show more evidence on supplementation before patients are sick enough to be hospitalized. My gut feeling is that it won't make a difference, but until we have the data I can't know for sure. This study, however, makes me feel more confident that I am not hurting a patient by withholding vit D supplementation if htey are admitted with severe Covid.

I've had extremely low D3 levels in the past. I'd like to point out that, even at high doses, getting your levels back to normal can take weeks.

Vitamin D deficiency varies widely by region because of sun exposure; Brazil is on the equator. Wonder if that skewed things.

Nitpick that doesn't invalidate your question: though the equator line does cross through Brazil, most of the population doesn't live anywhere close to the equator.

Also, Brazil is 4000 kilometers long from north to south.

"Close" is relative. Most of the population of Brazil lives within the tropics, and the furthest point from the equator in Brazil is closer than the southernmost points in the US or Europe, where much of the relevant studies were conducted.

What are your thoughts on this?

"Does supplemental Vitamin D help prevent Covid-19?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq8_mFotS64

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