<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>supernova87a</author><text>Wow, anyone reading the source paper in detail (or trying to take away conclusions) has to know that the stats are really, &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; rough.&lt;p&gt;The authors are almost just doing internet desk research -- counting the number of Covid deaths&amp;#x2F;cases and just plotting that against the average Vitamin D level in the population &lt;i&gt;of each Indian state in general&lt;/i&gt;.  Based on a couple thousand &lt;i&gt;healthy&lt;/i&gt; patients of the general population.  (BTW, I think it&amp;#x27;s really important that everyone learn to see through the math&amp;#x2F;symbols&amp;#x2F;technical jargon when reading such research papers to understand the populations really being studied.  All those &lt;i&gt;r&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;p&lt;/i&gt; numbers are meaningless if the underlying patient data are flawed.)&lt;p&gt;That is really rough.  I could not imagine this would be credible if you substituted for example (just to think about it locally with a population you might know), &amp;quot;New York&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;Maharastra&amp;quot; state in the plot and asked if you believed the strength of finding that average Vitamin D level in New York state correlates with Covid death rate.  How about for Florida -- would that be believable too? And also, the noticeable points making up the perceived trend are so few, and the points are not even weighted for population size (?)!&lt;p&gt;Much more work in detail -- at the &lt;i&gt;patient level&lt;/i&gt; with Vitamin D measurement -- would have to be done to be credible.   I would not act on this information in the present form.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Lack of Vitamin D is associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and mortality</title><url>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7489890/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>PKop</author><text>This could also explain the higher Covid death rates for Blacks in the US, while Africa has relatively lower death rates&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nature.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;s41371-020-00398-z&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.nature.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;s41371-020-00398-z&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Lack of Vitamin D is associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and mortality</title><url>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7489890/</url></story>