You can live to an old age with common conditions like diabetes, vitamin D deficiency, and subclinical heart issues.
Also, unless you think old age is a curable health issue, shutdowns are still the only way to keep people in that group safe.
> improving diets and removing pollution from the air
How does one improve the diets of billions of people in a few days?
Shutdowns are instant. Major overhauls of civilization are not.
https://www.wfla.com/community/health/coronavirus/new-cdc-re...
In fact, without being a scientist, AFAIK this is one of the major problems of science and how it is consumed, understood, and used/abused in society at large, but also within the publication realm itself. If a certain scientific finding is boring and merely confirms something else (which is critical in science), there are less incentives to do it. As a result, truth becomes characterised by 'sensational' things, not necessarily true or accurate things. Scientists and followers of science fail so much to see our own biases and shortcomings. We're getting there, but we're hampered very much by our human nature.
I like that their conclusion is 'more information needed' rather than 'deploy all the vitamin-c'. It seems to warrant further study, even if the amount they've done so far has limitations.
Or because doctors wouldn't know the baseline vitamin C levels in the general population?
https://testdirectory.questdiagnostics.com/test/test-detail/...
Practically a lab tech who works under their franchise would have a book with instructions to do the test and would have a fair chance of doing it accurately with 10 tries, a good chance of doing it accurately within 100 and not-quite-certainty of doing it accurately within 1000 tries.
According to the that page the test requires that your blood be frozen to -70 C after drawing. They can do that a hospital but not at your Dr.'s office.
The current Vitamin C test is based on HLPC, there was something else used prior to 2000 or so which is not comparable to the current test.
The researchers could do that right but they could easily do it wrong. That's why "double blind" is important, it doesn't just test the hypothesis but it tests the tests.
Also it is shocking how little questions such as "baseline vitamin C levels in the population" are researched. It is going to be variable in specific populations (e.g. people who show up sick at your clinic) because it is depressed by tobacco smoking, affected by dietary intake, etc. For a hospital with a 100,000-patient customer base sampling 1,000 patients might establish a good baseline. A fair price for that test seems to be $40, so it is $40,000 to get that baseline, just 40 cents per customer. The challenge is to get it all in one place while there are thousands of other not-FDA-approved tests that might turn up interesting results that compete for it and where everyone thinks we spend too much already.
