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6 Dec, 5 tweets, 2 min read
For those who are interested, the largest clinical trial to date has thus far not shown a benefit for vitamin D supplementation to treat severe COVID-19

medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
That being said, the numbers are still pretty small and I don't think we can make any definite statements either way at this point
That being said, the study looks impressively solid, and this is some truly beautiful honesty wrt sample size
The only very minor criticism I have of this research is that the sensitivity analysis used a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons, which you could argue is a bit too blunt and may bias towards the null. That being said, it doesn't change the main results anyway so...eh
Main results are here - no benefit from vitamin D for hospital stay duration, death, ICU likelihood, or duration of mechanical ventilation

Pretty much no impact whatsoever

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More from @GidMK

Health Nerd Profile picture
7 Dec
Despite this story going massively viral (because it is about penises) I reckon it's worth pointing out that the evidence or this statement seems to be mostly theoretical
The only scientific paper referenced that I can find anywhere is this piece from July that basically says that there are plausible pathways for COVID-19 to cause ED so we should watch out for it

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32661947/
I mean, sure, the pathways seem plausible, but imo the time to be really worried about something is when we've got evidence that it is a problem
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
3 Dec
Ugh both the headline and the study it's based on are...pretty dubious

Let's look at some science on twitter 1/n
2/n Paper is here, it's really your bog-standard epidemiological study. The authors took a large database of people who had tested positive to COVID-19 and compared them to people who hadn't in Israel
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
3/n The two groups were different in loads of ways. However, after putting all the variables into a statistical model, they found that asthma appeared to still be significantly connected to risk of COVID-19!
Read 14 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
2 Dec
The important thing to remember is that (outside of a trial) REPORTED side-effects are common. Side-effects LINKED TO THE VACCINE are much less so
Worth clarifying here that what I mean is that there will undoubtedly be many reports of problems that people have following vaccination - this is NORMAL
It's just the law of large numbers at work. If enough people are given a vaccine, sooner or later one of them will be, say, hit by a car shortly after

The question is whether this is related to the vaccine or not!
Read 7 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
27 Nov
Wow. Yet another ecological paper on COVID-19 that appears to have some astonishing flaws

Let's do a bit of peer-review on twitter 1/n
2/n Paper is here. Basically, the authors took total COVID-19 mortality in a range of countries by August 31st and correlated them with country-level metrics such as average BMI frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…
3/n The authors found that country-level metrics compiled by the University of Oxford on the stringency of lockdowns did not correlate well with the number of deaths that a country experienced from COVID-19, but other things like BMI and latitude did
Read 18 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
25 Nov
This is actually an excellent point that is not made often enough. Most vaccine trials are done over years, so they have smaller numbers because more people get infected. The COVID-19 trials are VAST
We won't pick up on any long-term side-effects that only take place after 6-12 months, of course, because of the shorter time frame

Still, the trials are pretty amazing
Worth noting here that when I say "long-term" I really mean "only diagnosed after 6 months". By the time vaccines are rolled out, we'll have at least 6 months of follow-up data so anything that you'd expect to be picked up in that time-frame should show some signal
Read 5 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
25 Nov
I added some very useful context

Tests take a short time to be recorded as cases. Cases take a while to go to hospital and then be recorded. Deaths take weeks to appear in the stats

The deaths reported today represent people who got sick ~3-6 weeks ago 😬
The corollary, of course, is that we won't see deaths attributable to the enormous rise in cases for another few weeks, and that hospitalizations from the record-breaking days of new cases are still coming in
This is all very rough, and since @COVID19Tracking aggregates all the different states there's a lot of variance. Different places report differently!
Read 4 tweets

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