Today, people are asking why women are less affected by COVID-19 and have significantly lower death rate than men (in Italy, for example: more than 60% of infected are males and more than 70% of death cases are of male).
While there are hypotheses that this is caused by various societal and life style factors and norms, such as ‘because more men are smokers’ etc., I would like to examine potential genetic causes of that.
Men carry both X and Y chromosomes. Women carry only X chromosomes.
As I wrote a couple of years ago on my blog about the differences of dynamics between X and Y chromosomes (see links to my two articles below), I made a hypothesis that women’s chromosome pool is significantly more dynamic and mutable than men’s. The Y part of men’s genes don’t mutate. They carry Y-DNA through generations unchanged. Thus women naturally bring greater adaptability and robustness to environmental conditions than men. Contrary to that men bring certain long-term elements and inertiality, which is also important for stable societies.
Importantly, perhaps, I also showed an analogy between the combined process of gene evolution in humans and other species, thanks to the presence of both males and females) and PID (Proportional-Integral-Differential) control that is proven to be the most successful type of control in engineering systems.
So, the nature’s own PID control (where the role of P and D is greater than that of I for the purposes of quick response to effects such as viruses) makes sure that only a relatively smaller number of males compared to the number of females are needed to maintain the human kind.
So, as usual, Mother Nature and genetics are the winners in this almost game-theoretic scenario of our battle against coronavirus.