It’s somewhat taboo to suggest that ethnic groups might be genetically superior or inferior to others, but when it comes to susceptibility or resistance to specific diseases, we should be willing to acknowledge this possibility. Most countries in Asia seemed to manage the Covid emergency much better than most western countries. I thought from the beginning that much better health and quarantine systems at airports must be a big factor. Somewhat privacy-invasive contact tracing measures and a willingness to restrict movement seem to be other significant differences between west and east, and you can see these even in Australia and New Zealand which are still largely ethnically European (although I say lots of Asian faces on trips on Sydney). But even given that, it always seemed like there might be some genetic or lifestyle factors to explain the order-of-magnitude differences.

Studies have shown that more people in Asia have a defense enzyme called APOBEC3A that attacks RNA viruses, including the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, when compared to people in Europe and Africa…

Some people may wonder if the self-extinction of the delta variant in Japan was caused by something special in the genetic make-up of Japanese people, but Inoue disagrees.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “People in East Asia, such as Koreans, are ethnically the same as Japanese. But I don’t know why this observation was made in Japan.”

Japan Times

The “self-extinction”, by the way, is the idea that once isolated from external influxes and exposed to a largely resistant population, the virus may have acquired mutations that have doomed it.

I understand why it is politically and culturally hard to do contact tracing and quarantine in the U.S., and nearly impossible to physically restrict movement. I still don’t understand why we can’t implement effective screening and quarantine procedures at our international airports when we have had a year and a half of emergency conditions now to get that done.