Why is Japan still a coronavirus outlier?
I&#x27;m also thinking of the &quot;biological resistance&quot; angle.<p>Japan is known to have extremely low rates of common comorbidity factors: cardiovascular conditions, obesity, etc. By very significant margins, consider dividing the prevalence of these conditions by 2 to 10 compared to the West.<p>Add to that a generally balanced nutrition, due to a culinary culture quite aligned with those goals (whether by chance or by design, that&#x27;s another question...)<p>Hypothesis: added to the factors you mentioned, you end up with a population &#x27;much less likely&#x27; to develop complications with COVID-19 (also possibly immune quicker on average after infection, thus lower R₀). So they get it but instead of 20% requiring hospitalization, maybe only 1-5% do, and that&#x27;s somehow manageable and results in much lower numbers since they only test critical cases.<p>We&#x27;ll only see in the postmortems of all these patients, but I&#x27;m willing to bet right now that most cases requiring ICU treatment had some sort of underlying condition that favored the virus progress; age being one such condition (as defined by De Grey, essentially tear and wear of the machine conceptually).<p>I don&#x27;t know, but there&#x27;s definitely something with Japan and COVID-19, and the slow progression of infections (despite the lack of strict confinement measures or systematic testing) is already fact compared to any other country I&#x27;m aware of. It&#x27;s not just luck.