Type O blood linked to lower COVID risk, taking Vitamin D unlikely to help - Reuters

Among 225,556 Canadians who were tested for the virus, the risk for a COVID-19 diagnosis was 12% lower and the risk for severe COVID-19 or death was 13% lower in people with blood group O versus those with A, AB, or B, researchers reported on Tuesday in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Low levels of vitamin D have been linked to higher risk for severe COVID-19, but high vitamin D levels do not fix the problem.

They randomly gave 240 patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19 either a single high dose of vitamin D3 or a placebo.

The authors say theirs is the first randomized trial of its kind to show that vitamin D supplementation "is ineffective to improve hospital length of stay or any other clinical outcomes among hospitalized patients with severe COVID-19." (bit.ly/3mfqOeH).

A form of inflammatory cell death called panoptosis triggers the storm of cytokines, or inflammatory proteins, that causes critical illness in COVID-19, researchers say.

COVID-19 survivors benefit from home health care after being discharged from hospital, new data show.

Researchers from the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, the University of Pennsylvania, and Villanova University studied 1,409 patients who received home health care, nearly half of whom were under age 65

After an average of 32 days of home health care, 94% no longer needed the service

This study "suggests that HHC is significantly underutilized in the recovery of hospitalized COVID-19 patients." (bit.ly/39kY7Jz)