Genetic factor may soften Covid blow for Japanese: study

asia.nikkei.com

13 points·quantisan··5 comments

I can't tell if this is the ongoing Japanese media pushing their "Japanese is superior" agenda or is this legit...

for context, the local media has been going overtime spewing out outlandish theories on why the Japanese COVID numbers has been so low despite having all the recipes for otherwise. e.g. see their "This is a pen" test on TV comparing Japanese vs English https://youtu.be/mtnVU4BU39E?t=121 (youtube link directly to the cringey segment)

While I don’t have any idea of whether the paper you linked to is accurate or not, and I am unsure about the Japanese government actually pushing any agenda like that. I believe that a much likelier reason is that the Japanese are trying to make sense of their low numbers compared to other countries. The example linked to in the video is especially dumb (I couldn’t look at it but I think I know which one you are talking about), but if you look everywhere there’s bound to be some reasons that seem to be causal but aren’t.

I think the dumb video isn't the one from the Japanese TV, but from the dude who makes fun of it to get views on his clickbaity YouTube channel. See https://www.pnas.org/content/117/41/25237

See https://www.pnas.org/content/117/41/25237

So IMHO, the dumb one isn't the "pen test" from the Japanese TV, but rather the clickbaity YouTube video that makes fun of it. That said, the Japanese TV is slightly tongue in cheek, it doesn't claim to be a science channel.

The thing is though that japanese can be as poppy as English and vice versa.

A screaming japanese and a screaming English speaker will most likely spread equally amount of germs.

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