| haxxiy said: Most Brazilians don't have high levels of vitamin D. Do you know that phrase coined in the British Raj, that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun? It turns out that to bask in the tropical heat isn't exactly comfortable to most people. https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0004-27302007000300012 https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0004-27302008000300008 Regardless, older people will produce vitamin D more slowly than younger people, same as the difference between darker and lighter skin, so both ethnicity and age disparity would add to the confounding factors at play here. Of course, since the immunomodulatory effects of vitamin D have been known for a long time, a little sunshine here and there can't hurt. |
Funny, in that graph from the daily mail Brazilians come out on top with Vitamin D levels.
I quickly corrected that correlation graph for where the cases per million are at today:
Not much left from that cherry picked correlation...
Also women tend to have lower vitamin D levels than men (at higher age) yet men (with lower avg age, women live longer) still die more from covid19 than women. Comparing countries by avg vitamin D levels is a fallacy anyway since that avg is directly tied to the average age in the country, vitamin D levels are very much age dependent. https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminD-HealthProfessional/
Lose correlations like average vitamin D levels and reported deaths ignore so many things. What you can also show that way is that higher vitamin D levels will reduce your average lifespan, or that older people wouldn't be dying so much from covid19 if only they had more vitamin D.
And then there's still the whole disparity in socioeconomic factors, like front facing jobs, lower income neighborhoods, smaller houses with bigger households, nutrition differences leading to different levels in comorbidities.
Vitamin D deficiency (< 30 nmol / 12 ng/ml) has many bad effects. Insuficiency (< 50 nmol / 20 ng/ml) probably less of an effect. Also comorbidities could lead to vitamin D deficiency or be caused by vitamin D deficiency. A correlation is just that, a correlation.
It's definitely worth looking into. Covid19 is not going away before next year and vitamin D levels tend to drop come winter time. It needs a real study, same age groups, same risk factors, only vitamin D levels as the variable.
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