Positive trends in pandemic statistics in the United States are easy to distrust. After all, the country went through two false dawns last year, in the late spring and then again in the late summer, when declines in case reports prefaced even darker days. Each time, the apparent good news prompted relaxations and reopenings that helped bring on the next wave.So it is no surprise that public health experts are wary about the latest flattening in the curve of the pandemic, from the steep decline in cases seen in late January and February to something like a plateau or slight decline more recently. With more contagious virus variants becoming prevalent, they fear the good news could be ending and a fourth wave might be building.That said, there are positive signs:Daily death reports, which stayed stubbornly high long after the post-holidays surge, have finally come down sharply, to levels not seen since mid-November. As of Monday, the nation had averaged 1,051 newly reported Covid deaths a day over the past week; the average had hovered around 3,000 for weeks over the winter.Some recent hot spots have made major progress — notably Los Angeles, whose mayor, Eric Garcetti, said on CBS on Sunday that he had “not felt this optimism in 12 months.” The city and surrounding county, where cases in some areas leapt 450 percent over the holidays and hospitals became so swamped that some turned away ambulances, now has a test positivity rate of about 1.9 percent, and in an important shift, new case reports have fallen among people experiencing homelessness.Vaccinations are becoming more accessible by the week, as states receive more doses and open up eligibility, in some cases to include all adult residents. The number of doses administered nationwide each day is rising, and the country surpassed President Biden’s initial goal to have administered 100 million shots on March 19, almost six weeks ahead of schedule.The question now is which will prevail: the positive effects of trends like these or the negative effects of looser behavior and the evolution of the virus into more dangerous forms?It’s still “a race between vaccinations and variants,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said on Twitter. Like other experts, he cautioned: “Opening up too fast helps the variants.”Listen to ‘The Daily’: A Food Critic Loses Her Sense of SmellA Times restaurant critic is on a quest to regain a crucial ability after Covid-19.

In the fall, after Samar Khan came down with a mild case of Covid-19, she expected to recover and return to her previous energetic life in Chicago. After all, she was just 25, and healthy.But weeks later, she said, “this weird constellation of symptoms began to set in.”She had blurred vision encircled with strange halos. She had ringing in her ears, and everything began to smell like cigarettes or Lysol. One leg started to tingle, and her hands would tremble while putting on eyeliner.She also developed “really intense brain fog,” she said. Trying to concentrate on a call for her job in financial services, she felt as if she had just come out of anesthesia. And during a debate about politics with her husband, Zayd Hayani, “I didn’t remember what I was trying to say or what my stance was,” she said.By the end of the year, Ms. Khan was referred to a special clinic for Covid-related neurological symptoms at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, which has been evaluating and counseling hundreds of people from across the country who are experiencing similar problems.Now, the clinic, which sees about 60 new patients a month, in-person and via telemedicine, has published the first study focused on long-term neurological symptoms in people who were never physically sick enough from Covid-19 to need hospitalization, including Ms. Khan.The study of 100 patients from 21 states, published on Tuesday in The Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, found that 85 percent of them experienced four or more neurological issues like brain fog, headaches, tingling, muscle pain and dizziness.“We are seeing people who are really highly, highly functional individuals, used to multitasking all the time and being on top of their game, but, all of a sudden, it’s really a struggle for them,” said Dr. Igor J. Koralnik, the chief of neuro-infectious diseases and global neurology at Northwestern Medicine, who oversees the clinic and is the senior author of the study.The report, in which the average patient age was 43, underscores the emerging understanding that for many people, long Covid can be worse than their initial bouts with the infection, with a stubborn and complex array of symptoms.This month, a study that analyzed electronic medical records in California found that nearly a third of the people struggling with long Covid symptoms — like shortness of breath, cough and abdominal pain — did not have any signs of illness in the first 10 days after they tested positive for the coronavirus. Surveys by patient-led groups have also found that many Covid survivors with long-term symptoms were never hospitalized for the disease.In the Northwestern study, many experienced symptoms that fluctuated or persisted for months. Most improved over time, but there was wide variation. “Some people after two months are 95 percent recovered, while some people after nine months are only 10 percent recovered,” said Dr. Koralnik. Five months after contracting the virus, patients estimated, they felt on average only 64 percent recovered.

Medical schools and students alike have had to adapt to remote cadaver dissections and bedside-manner training via Zoom.Jerrel Catlett’s eyes narrowed on the large intestine, a gloppy, glow stick-like object whose color matched the stool stored inside of it. He chose to isolate the organ, and it expanded on his screen as the body parts surrounding it receded — the gall bladder bright green with bile, the ribs white and curved like half moons.“My old boss used to tell me that when I did this, I’d be so wowed by how complex the human body is,” said Mr. Catlett, 25, a first-year student at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, gesturing to the image of a body on his laptop screen. “But it feels like there’s something missing from the experience right now.”For generations, medical students were initiated to their training by a ritual as gory as it was awe-inducing: the cadaver dissection. Since at least the 14th century, physicians have honed their understanding of human anatomy by examining dead bodies. But amid the coronavirus pandemic, the cadaver dissection — like many hands-on aspects of the medical curriculum — turned virtual, using a three-dimensional simulation software.Of the country’s 155 medical schools, a majority transitioned at least part of their first and second-year curriculums to remote learning during the pandemic. Nearly three-quarters offered lectures virtually, according to a survey by the Association of American Medical Colleges, and 40 percent used virtual platforms to teach students how to interview patients about their symptoms and take their medical histories. Though the cadaver dissection posed a trickier challenge, nearly 30 percent of medical schools, including Mount Sinai, used online platforms to teach anatomy.Though medical students in many states have been eligible for and able to receive the vaccines, some have not yet fully shifted back to in-person learning, with school administrators saying they preferred to wait until Covid case rates decline further. Some in-person training, like practicing clinical skills, has largely resumed.Medical schools adapted in the past year with inventive approaches to clinical training. Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and Stanford used virtual reality technology to teach anatomy. The Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University offered students the opportunity to shadow doctors virtually, sitting in on tele-medicine appointments. And at Baylor College of Medicine last fall, students were assessed via video on giving physical exams by describing what actions they would be taking in person, according to Dr. Nadia Ismail, Baylor’s associate dean of curriculum: “Now I would hit you at this part of the knee and this is the reflex I would see.”The Keck School of Medicine, at the University of Southern California, opted to have faculty members dissect cadavers while wearing body cameras so students could watch remotely. The cadavers were also imaged using three-dimensional scanners, so students could practice manipulating the sorts of images produced by magnetic resonance imaging and CT scans.“When the faculty came up with this, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is amazing,’” said Dr. Donna Elliott, vice dean for medical education at Keck. “These scanned, three-dimensional images approximate the type of imaging you’ll use as a clinician.”Educators are aware that for all the promise of new technologies, there’s a sense of loss for students who aren’t able to be in hospitals, classrooms and dissection laboratories in person. “The classroom of the medical school is the clinical environment, and it’s so stretched right now,” said Lisa Howley, senior director for strategic initiatives and partnerships at the A.A.M.C. “That worries me.”Students said they felt some frustration as they watched the pressures mount on frontline providers without any capacity to help. “We know more than the average person, but we feel generally powerless,” said Saundra Albers, 28, a second-year student at Columbia.Both faculty members and students realize that watching organs move on a laptop screen is not the same as removing them, one by one, from a human body. “A cadaver’s body parts wouldn’t look as smooth and perfect as they do on a screen,” Mr. Catlett said. “Let’s say the cadaver was an alcoholic, you might see liver cirrhosis with bumps and ridges covering the liver.”He and his classmates know that they missed a medical rite of passage: “We don’t get to feel what the tissues are like, or how hard the bones are.”Mr. Catlett and his classmates have now been offered vaccines, and they are beginning to resume some in-person activities, including meeting with patients for the first time this month. Their lectures are still online.Sarah Calove, 26, near her home in Castaic, Calif. late last year.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesSarah Serrano Calove, 26, is a second-year student at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, which offered a blend of in-person and virtual learning last semester. Since the start of medical school, Ms. Calove had been eager to practice interacting with patients — taking their medical histories and delivering news of diagnoses — so the transition to learning clinical skills on Zoom was a letdown.She was assigned to interview a medical actor, referred to as a standardized patient, about his financial troubles, an emotional conversation that she found awkward to conduct virtually.“When you’re on Zoom, you can’t tell if the person is clenching their hands or shaking their legs,” she said. “For some of my classmates, the feedback was we had to show more empathy. But how am I supposed to make my empathy known through a computer screen?”Medical schools were often unable to arrange for students to practice their skills on medical actors last semester, because these actors tend to come from older, retired populations that are at heightened risk for Covid-19. Some schools, including the University of Massachusetts, had students conduct practice physical exams on their classmates, forgoing the parts of the exam that involve opening the mouth and looking into the nose.For Ms. Calove, being assessed on her physical exam skills was challenging because she could prepare only by watching videos, whereas any other year she would have had weeks of in-person practice.“Normally, you’d listen to lungs wheezing, feel an enlarged liver, find the edges of the abdominal aorta,” she said. “Listening to a heart murmur recording online is different than hearing it in person.”Still, she appreciated the school’s efforts to check in with her and her classmates about how they were faring as they adapted to partially remote learning.Some students pointed to a silver lining in their virtual medical training: They’ve become adept at speaking with patients about sensitive issues over video, a lesson very likely to prove essential as the field of tele-medicine expands. Through remote clerkships at schools like Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, medical students assisted hospital staff by following up virtually with patients who had been discharged earlier than usual because of the pandemic.“Other doctors got thrown into the deep end but we get to practice using this technology,” said Ernesto Rojas, a second-year student at University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. “We learned how to build rapport and ask the patient things like, ‘Are you in a place where you can talk privately?’”Students have also said they’ve felt particularly motivated to complete their training amid the pandemic. Medical school applications are up by 18 percent compared with this time last year, according to the A.A.M.C.For Prerana Katiyar, 22, a first-year medical student at Columbia, the first few months of medical school didn’t look anything like she had anticipated. She started the semester living in her childhood home in Fairfax, Va., where she shared lessons from her anatomy classes with her family over dinner. “When my dad said his abdomen hurt, I was able to talk to him about the quadrants of the abdomen,” Ms. Katiyar said.Halfway into the semester, she had an exciting update for her parents. “My skull finally arrived in the mail,” she said. Ms. Katiyar’s anatomy professor arranged for each student to order a plastic model of the skull.“Now I can see the bony landmarks and where the nerves are,” she continued. “I’m a very visual person so it’s been helpful to trace it with my finger.”

Tuberculosis remains a rare disease in the United States, but when it does occur, delays in diagnosing it often exceed recommendations by the World Health Organization, according to a new report by Harvard Medical School researchers published March 22 in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The typical, or median, delay in diagnosing an active case of TB was 24 days, according to the study, with the majority of delays ranging between 10 and 45 days. However, some delays were much longer — up to 250 days in certain cases. Unlike latent TB, in which the person who carries the TB bacterium has no symptoms and cannot infect others, people with active TB have symptoms and can transmit the infection to others.
The new analysis revealed that delayed diagnoses were linked to a higher likelihood of the infection being transmitted to household members. It also found a concerning link between delays in diagnosis and the risk for disease progression.
To minimize TB complications and prevent infection transmission, the WHO calls for initiating diagnostic workup and prompt treatment for all patients who have symptoms suggestive of active TB infection for two weeks or longer.
“The delays we found would be concerning under any circumstances, but they are unacceptable in a well-resourced health care system such as the United States,” said study senior investigator Maha Farhat, assistant professor of biomedical informatics in the Blavatnik Institute of Harvard Medical School and a pulmonary medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.
While the new study was not designed to tease out the reasons behind the diagnostic delays, the researchers say one of the more likely drivers is lack of awareness among clinicians, possibly due to the rarity of TB in the United States. The classic TB presentation includes coughing up blood, fever, and night sweats, but TB can also presents with a range of symptoms that do not fit this textbook triad and can throw physicians off the scent, making prompt diagnosis challenging.

Insomnia, disrupted sleep, and daily burnout are linked to a heightened risk of not only becoming infected with coronavirus, but also having more severe disease and a longer recovery period, suggests an international study of healthcare workers, published in the online journal BMJ Nutrition Prevention & Health.
Every 1-hour increase in the amount of time spent asleep at night was associated with 12% lower odds of becoming infected with COVID-19, the findings indicate.
Disrupted/insufficient sleep and work burnout have been linked to a heightened risk of viral and bacterial infections, but it’s not clear if these are also risk factors for COVID-19, say the researchers.
To explore this further, they drew on the responses to an online survey for healthcare workers repeatedly exposed to patients with COVID-19 infection, such as those working in emergency or intensive care, and so at heightened risk of becoming infected themselves.
The survey ran from 17 July to 25 September 2020, and was open to healthcare workers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the USA.
Respondents provided personal details on lifestyle, health, and use of prescription meds and dietary supplements plus information on the amount of sleep they got at night and in daytime naps over the preceding year; any sleep problems; burnout from work; and workplace exposure to COVID-19 infection.

Infliximab, a powerful biologic that is used to treat inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), blunts the body’s immune response to COVID-19 infection, indicates research published online in the journal Gut.
This impaired response may boost susceptibility to recurrent COVID-19 and help drive the evolution of new variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the infection, warn the researchers.
Careful monitoring of IBD patients treated with infliximab will be needed after vaccination against COVD-19 to ensure they mount a strong enough antibody response to ward off the infection, they advise.
Infliximab belongs to a class of medicines called anti-tumour necrosis factor (anti-TNF) drugs. These drugs suppress the production of an inflammatory protein involved in the development of several conditions, including ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease which are types of inflammatory bowel disease.
Around 2 million people worldwide are treated with anti-TNF drugs, which are known to impair protective immunity following vaccination against pneumonia, flu, and viral hepatitis, as well as increasing the risk of serious infection, particularly respiratory infections.
Because of these risks, patients taking these drugs have been advised to shield during the coronavirus pandemic and/or take extra precautions to minimise their risk of catching COVID-19.

Almost 90 percent of infectious travelers could be detected with rapid SARS-CoV-2 tests at the airport, and most imported infections could be prevented with a combination of pre-travel testing and a five-day post-travel quarantine that would only lift with a negative test result, according to a computer simulation by UC San Francisco researchers.
The study offers much-needed data to airlines and states that have struggled through a year of the pandemic with little guidance on how to enable safe travel.
The issue is becoming more pressing as states reopen and travelers return to the skies. Data from the Transportation Security Administration show that air travel has been on the rise since the 2020-2021 holiday season, although it is still only one-third to one-half of what it was before the pandemic.
“This evidence could be useful to standardize testing and quarantine policy for COVID-19 at the airline, city and state level for travelers,” said Nathan Lo, MD, PhD, a resident physician and incoming faculty fellow in infectious diseases at UCSF and senior author of the paper, which was published March 22, 2021, in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. “Nothing will be perfectly safe, and travel will always pose a risk to the individual and for importation to states, but this is a way to substantially minimize the risk.”
The data in the study come from a large-scale computer simulation of how different combinations of testing and quarantine can prevent infectious travelers from spreading COVID-19. The model makes forecasts based on what is already known about how many people are likely to be infected on any given day, how long they are likely to be infectious and how likely different types of tests are to detect infectious people.
The study simulated the probability that 100,000 travelers would be infectious on any given day shortly before, during and after their trips, given a range of different pre-travel testing and post-travel quarantine-plus-testing strategies.

Scientists from the Department of Physiology of the University of Granada (UGR) have shown that caffeine (about 3 mg/kg, the equivalent of a strong coffee) ingested half an hour before aerobic exercise significantly increases the rate of fat-burning. They also found that if the exercise is performed in the afternoon, the effects of the caffeine are more marked than in the morning.
In their study, published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, the researchers aimed to determine whether caffeine — one of the most commonly-consumed ergogenic substances in the world to improve sports performance — actually does increase oxidation or “burning” of fat during exercise. Despite the fact that its consumption in the form of supplements is very common, the scientific evidence for its beneficial claims is scarce.
“The recommendation to exercise on an empty stomach in the morning to increase fat oxidation is commonplace. However, this recommendation may be lacking a scientific basis, as it is unknown whether this increase is due to exercising in the morning or due to going without food for a longer period of time,” explains the lead author of this research, Francisco José Amaro-Gahete of the UGR’s Department of Physiology.
A total of 15 men (mean age, 32) participated in the research, completing an exercise test four times at seven-day intervals. Subjects ingested 3 mg/kg of caffeine or a placebo at 8am and 5pm (each subject completed the tests in all four conditions in a random order). The conditions prior to each exercise test (hours elapsed since last meal, physical exercise, or consumption of stimulant substances) were strictly standardized, and fat oxidation during exercise was calculated accordingly.
Maximum fat oxidation
“The results of our study showed that acute caffeine ingestion 30 minutes before performing an aerobic exercise test increased maximum fat oxidation during exercise regardless of the time of day,” explains Francisco J. Amaro. The existence of a diurnal variation in fat oxidation during exercise was confirmed, the values being higher in the afternoon than in the morning for equal hours of fasting.
These results also show that caffeine increases fat oxidation during morning exercise in a similar way to that observed without caffeine intake in the afternoon.
In summary, the findings of this study suggest that the combination of acute caffeine intake and aerobic exercise performed at moderate intensity in the afternoon provides the optimal scenario for people seeking to increase fat-burning during physical exercise.
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Materials provided by University of Granada. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute have identified a drug candidate that blocks the uptake of glutamine, a key food source for many tumors, and slows the growth of melanoma. The drug is a small molecule that targets a glutamine transporter, SLC1A5, which pumps the nutrient into cancer cells — offering a promising new approach for treating melanoma and other cancers. The study was published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics.
“While great strides have been made recently in the treatment of melanoma, many patients’ tumors become resistant to therapy, and this has become a major obstacle in the successful treatment of the disease,” says Ze’ev Ronai, Ph.D., director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated Cancer Center at Sanford Burnham Prebys and senior author of the study. “This study describes a promising compound that selectively targets the uptake of glutamine, an amino acid nutrient that tumors rely on for survival. We are hopeful this drug will fill an unmet medical need for people living with this deadly cancer.”
More than 7,000 people die from melanoma each year in the U.S., according to the American Cancer Society, and cases continue to increase annually. In the past decade, immunotherapy and personalized treatments have extended survival times for many patients. However, because of the high incidence of cancer recurrence, scientists are increasingly focused on therapeutic strategies to prevent relapse and increase overall survival.
“This is a very important study because many targeted drugs for melanoma treatment have been significantly hindered by the rapid development of treatment resistance, sometimes as quickly as within several months. While immunotherapy approaches are promising, they are only effective in a subset of patients, and treatment resistance can also develop in this setting as well,” says M. Celeste Simon, Ph.D., Arthur H. Rubenstein, MBBCh Professor in the department of Cell and Developmental Biology and scientific director of the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “The drug candidate identified in Dr. Ronai’s study offers an exciting new therapeutic approach for treating tumors addicted to glutamine, which includes a long list of human cancers, and will hopefully lengthen the amount of time that people with melanoma respond to available treatments.”
Blocking the tumor’s food supply
Researchers know that rapidly growing tumors are able to reprogram their metabolism to generate extra energy to survive and grow. Tumors often achieve this by pumping increasing levels of the amino acid glutamine into their cells, primarily through a pump called SLC1A5. As a result, cancer researchers are working to find drugs that block SLC1A5 and reduce glutamine levels.
In the study, Ronai and his team set out to identify drug(s) that can inhibit glutamine uptake. Working in collaboration with researchers at the Institute’s Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics, the scientists screened 7,000 diverse compounds for their ability to interfere with SLC1A5. This work identified about 20 hits, or promising options, and one was selected based on its superior ability to prevent SLC1A5 from reaching the cell membrane. This drug candidate, IMD-0354, inhibited tumor growth in both cell culture and in mice with melanoma.
“Our study shows that targeting SLC1A5, which stops glutamine from ever entering the cell in the first place, is an effective way to slow cancer cell growth,” says Yongmei Feng, Ph.D., staff scientist in the Ronai lab at Sanford Burnham Prebys and first author of the study. “Because many tumor types are dependent upon glutamine for survival, this drug may be able to treat many different types of cancers.”
As a next step, Ronai and his team will further refine IMD-0354, with a focus on improving biophysical properties that will help accelerate preclinical evaluation of the drug candidate.

A new research study at the University of Chicago Medicine has found that when it comes to COVID-19, having vitamin D levels above those traditionally considered sufficient may lower the risk of infection, especially for Black people.
The study, published March 19 in JAMA Open Network, retrospectively examined the relationship between vitamin D levels and likelihood of testing positive for COVID-19. While levels of 30 ng/ml or more are usually considered “sufficient,” the authors found that Black individuals who had levels of 30 to 40 ng/ml had a 2.64 times higher risk of testing positive for COVID-19 than people with levels of 40 ng/ml or greater. Statistically significant associations of vitamin D levels with COVID-19 risk were not found in white people. The study looked at data from over 3,000 patients at UChicago Medicine who had had their vitamin D levels tested within 14 days before a COVID-19 test.
The research team is now recruiting participants for two separate clinical trials testing the efficacy of vitamin D supplements for preventing COVID-19.
This research is an expansion of an earlier study showing that a vitamin D deficiency (less than 20 ng/ml) may raise the risk of testing positive for COVID-19. In the current study, those results were further supported, finding that individuals with a vitamin D deficiency had a 7.2% chance of testing positive for the virus. A separate study recently found that over 80% of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 were vitamin D deficient.
“These new results tell us that having vitamin D levels above those normally considered sufficient is associated with decreased risk of testing positive for COVID-19, at least in Black individuals,” said David Meltzer, MD, PhD, Chief of Hospital Medicine at UChicago Medicine and lead author of the study. “This supports arguments for designing clinical trials that can test whether or not vitamin D may be a viable intervention to lower the risk of the disease, especially in persons of color.”
Meltzer was inspired to investigate this topic after seeing an article in early 2020 that found people with vitamin D deficiency who had randomly been assigned to receive vitamin D supplementation had much lower rates of viral respiratory infections compared to those who did not receive supplementation. He decided to examine data being collected at UChicago Medicine on COVID-19 to determine the role that vitamin D levels might be playing.
“There’s a lot of literature on vitamin D. Most of it has been focused on bone health, which is where the current standards for sufficient vitamin D levels come from,” Meltzer explained. “But there’s also some evidence that vitamin D might improve immune function and decrease inflammation. So far, the data has been relatively inconclusive. Based on these results, we think that earlier studies may have given doses that were too low to have much of an effect on the immune system, even if they were sufficient for bone health. It may be that different levels of vitamin D are adequate for different functions.”
Vitamin D can be obtained through diet or supplements, or produced by the body in response to exposure of the skin to sunlight. Meltzer noted that most individuals, especially people with darker skin, have lower levels of vitamin D; roughly half of the world’s population has levels below 30ng/ml. “Lifeguards, surfers, those are the kinds of folks who tend to have more than sufficient vitamin D levels,” he said. “Most folks living in Chicago in the winter are going to have levels that are well below that.”
While vitamin D supplements are relatively safe to take, excessive consumption of vitamin D supplements is associated with hypercalcemia, a condition in which calcium builds up in the blood stream and causes nausea, vomiting, weakness, and frequent urination. If left unchecked, it can further lead to bone pain and kidney stones.
“Currently, the adult recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D is 600 to 800 international units (IUs) per day,” said Meltzer. “The National Academy of Medicine has said that taking up to 4,000 IUs per day is safe for the vast majority of people, and risk of hypercalcemia increases at levels over 10,000 IUs per day.”
One of the challenges of this study is that it is currently difficult to determine exactly how vitamin D may be supporting immune function. “This is an observational study,” said Meltzer. “We can see that there’s an association between vitamin D levels and likelihood of a COVID-19 diagnosis, but we don’t know exactly why that is, or whether these results are due to the vitamin D directly or other related biological factors.”
Prompted by the evidence that people with vitamin D deficiency are more likely to test positive for COVID-19 and experience significant symptoms, a team at the University of Chicago and Rush University is conducting two studies to learn whether taking a daily vitamin D supplement can help prevent COVID-19 or decrease the severity of its symptoms.