I’d say from my experience, it isn’t just any one mineral. It’s a number of them. And then it takes a build-up of them in the system to get past the symptoms.
Boost may have been enough for you, but those amounts are quite tiny and there isn’t much there that you wouldn’t get from a multi-vitamin without that insane amount of needless sugar.
That wouldn’t have done it for me. That amount of zinc is 1/10 of what I regularly take daily and it required more than that to get past long covid.
I also took zinc, coq10, c, d3 and spiralina. The Boost was for the magnesium. I now drink boost as a creamer for my coffee. Still take the vitamins.