Authors' response: Ethnicity and vitamin D supplementations for COVID-19.

coronavirus disease 2019

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome‐Coronavirus‐2

Dear Editor,

We have read with the great interest a letter to editor by Akbari AR et al. which commented on our recent publications regarding vitamin D supplementations and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) outcomes. In their letter, the authors have raised important issue regarding ethnicity as a potential confounding factors which may influence the relationship between vitamin D supplementation and COVID‐19 outcomes. We agree with the Akbari AR et al. that African‐American adults may have higher prevalence of vitamin D deficiency and subsequently may affect the benefit of vitamin D supplementation during infection with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome‐Coronavirus‐2 in those groups of patients. We also agree that based on systematic review and meta‐analysis study, black ethnicity may have worse outcomes from COVID‐19 and can also affect these benefits of vitamin D supplementation. Even, our previously published meta‐analysis study have already addressed the ethnicity as a potential confounding factors for Covid‐19 and therefore analysed further during meta‐regression analysis. However, in the current study, it is not possible to analyse further the role of ethnicity through meta‐regression analysis because only 2 out of 11 included studies which have data regarding ethnicity characteristics. If we use the data only from two studies for meta‐regression analysis, we were afraid that it will cause a biased results. Therefore, we suggest that further studies regarding vitamin D supplementation in COVID‐19 patients to address the ethnicity as an important factors to be included in the studies' characteristics.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

AUTHORS CONTRIBUTIONS

Conceptualisation, methodology, formal analysis, data curation, writing‐original draft, visualisation, writing‐review and editing: Timotius Ivan Hariyanto. Conceptualisation, methodology, formal analysis, data curation, writing‐original draft, writing‐review and editing: Denny Intan. Conceptualisation, validation, supervision, writing‐review and editing: Joshua Edward Hananto. Conceptualisation, validation, supervision, writing‐review and editing: Harapan Harapan. Conceptualisation, validation, supervision, writing‐review and editing: Andree Kurniawan.