Japan has an order of magnitude lower obesity, surprised that isn’t mentioned in the article. If you are exposed to the virus and are obese you are far more likely to experience covid.
India has a lower rate of diabetes than Japan does, and a lower rate than the global average [0]
India has a large population of diabetics, but that’s due to their massive population size overall.
CIA world factbook measure Indias obesity rate to be lower than japan’s, though the data is from 2016:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_r...
Is it OP's position that an obesity rate of 3.9% is significantly lower than a rate of 4.3%?
OP seems to have overstated their claim.
Yes, in my opinion a 10% difference is significant. The source in no way contradicts that. If you believe 10% is not significant, that's just your opinion as well.
So if people have less comorbidities and that contributes to both less spread and less severe infections it should reduce contagion. Or I suppose contagion is still occurring but isn’t detected because the infections are subclinical and the host never even tests.
If you catch covid but don't feel it, then you'll go back to normal without ever testing and thus ever knowing you had it.
If this happens for many people in a country (because of whatever reason) then you could easily have 50-100x the recorded numbers but nobody would ever feel it.
People often overlook that Japan has had fewer than 2 million infected people. If you don’t get infected, you don’t get sick
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.