Interesting. It does not seem to me that we need to just wait passively for the vaccine to come save us, that there are many things we can do to put the odds in our favor.
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/12/3760/htm""As yet, there have been few studies reporting the vitamin C status of patients with COVID-19 (Table 1). A study of 21 critically ill COVID-19 patients admitted to ICU in the US found a mean level of 22 µmol/L, thus a majority had hypovitaminosis C. The mean level for 11 survivors was 29 µmol/L compared to 15 µmol/L for the 10 non-survivors; of these five (50%) had ≤11 µmol/L [34]. ......................
A study in an ICU in Barcelona of 18 COVID-19 patients meeting acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) criteria found that 17 had undetectable levels of vitamin C (i.e., <9 µmol/L) and one patient had a low vitamin C (14 µmol/L) [35].
Thus, low vitamin C levels are common in critically ill hospitalised patients with respiratory infections, pneumonia, sepsis and COVID-19, the most likely explanation being increased metabolic consumption [37]...............................................
5. Clinical Evidence for the Role of Vitamin C in Pneumonia
In 1951, Klenner investigated the effects of high doses of vitamin C, given intravenously, against viral diseases including pneumonia [76]. A Cochrane review on pneumonia and vitamin C identified three prophylactic RCTs reporting the number of pneumonia cases in participants who were administered oral vitamin C [22]. Each of these found a ≥80% lower incidence of pneumonia for the vitamin C group [77,78,79]. One was an RCT giving 2 g/day versus placebo to US Marine recruits during a two-month recruit training period and reported 1/331 cases of pneumonia in the vitamin C group versus 7/343 cases in the placebo group (p = 0.044) [77].
Two therapeutic trials were identified (Table 2). One was an RCT with elderly people in the UK (mean age 81 years), hospitalised with acute bronchitis or pneumonia. The study found that the plasma vitamin C level at baseline was 23 µmol/L (hypovitaminosis C) and one third of the patients had a vitamin C level of ≤11 µmol/L [18]. Vitamin C (0.2 g/day) reduced the respiratory symptom score in the more ill patients but not the less ill. There were six deaths during the study, all among the more ill patients: five in the placebo group, but only one in the vitamin C group.
The other RCT, in the former Soviet Union, administered two different doses, a variable high or low dose relating to the dosage of antibiotics given [27]. The duration of hospital stay in the control group was 23.7 days. In the low dose vitamin C group (0.25–0.8 g/day) hospital stay was 19% shorter and in the high-dose group (0.5–1.6 g/day) it was 36% shorter. A benefit was also reported in relation to erythrocyte sedimentation rate and the normalisation of chest X-ray and temperature.........
Clinicians using intravenous vitamin C in severely ill COVID-19 patients have reported clinical effects upon administration of 3 g every 6 h together with steroids and anti-coagulants [88].........Vitamin C has been reported to reduce mortality in septic patients requiring vasopressor treatment randomly assigned to be given 25 mg/kg body weight/day intravenous vitamin C every 6 h versus placebo (Table 2). Mortality at 28 days was significantly lower in the ascorbic acid than the placebo group (14% vs. 64%, respectively; p = 0.009) [81].................".