There are considerations other than genetic racial predisposition or vulnerability to infection, however.
As the Chinese are now reporting, the coronavirus infection affects older men much more than women. In the initial phase of infection in Wuhan, for example, 68% of patients were men. Strikingly, as recently as 2015, 68% of Chinese men were said to smoke cigarettes, making them predisposed to infection because of impaired lung health.
Still, no death so far has involved someone without East Asian ancestry, which may indicate, as with the SARS coronavirus epidemic in 2002-2004, that fear of a global pandemic resulting in millions of deaths may not be reasonable and that this may remain an East Asian epidemic. It could be that just as sub-Saharan Africa is responsible for 80% of genetic sickle cell disease China may be prone to respiratory disease for some as yet unknown genetic reason.
