Researchers find genetic factors played a greater role in a person’s overall wellbeing as the pandemic wore on.
Credit: Gary Butterfield, Unsplash (CC0)
Creationist mode: 
A new study by Lude Franke and colleagues of the University of Groningen, Netherlands has shown that some individuals were more affected than others by the COVID-19 pandemic, due to their genes.
Of course, any omniscient designer of those genes and of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, such as the one intelligent [sic] design creationists believe is the creator of everything, will have been fully aware of that fact when it created the virus, so can't escape the charge of deliberately targeting certain individuals because of their genetics.
The difference is to be found in how well or badly individuals coped not so much with infection by the virus, but with the overall social effect of the pandemic, including the measures to mitigate and control it.
The new study was published a couple of days ago in the open-access journal PLOS Genetics.
According to information made available by PLOS, in advance of publication:
How a person perceives their quality of life depends on a combination of factors that include the genes they inherited from their parents and their environment — a mix of nature and nurture. Studying genes related to quality of life can be complicated, but the COVID-19 pandemic allowed Franke and his colleagues to investigate how this stressful, worldwide event interacted with a person's genetics to affect their overall wellbeing. The team screened the genomes of more than 27,000 participants in the Netherlands who had donated genetic material to a biobank. Then they looked for connections between genetic variants and the participants' responses to a series of questionnaires about lifestyle and mental and physical health given over 10 months, starting in March 2020.The COVID-19 pandemic has been a unique opportunity to investigate the impact of genetics on wellbeing in a time wherein we had to socially isolate ourselves. We found that it is during the first, stressful year of the pandemic that it is our nature that has gained relative impact on how we rate our lives.
Robert Warmerdam, co-first author
Department of Genetics
University Medical Center Groningen
University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
The researchers found that some individuals had a genetic tendency toward better wellbeing than others during the pandemic. Additionally, as the pandemic wore on, they found that genetic tendency had an increasingly powerful influence on how those people perceived their quality of life, potentially due to the social isolation required by strict COVID-19 containment measures. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that the contribution of genetics to complex traits like wellbeing can change over time.
Creationist mode: 
The findings of the Groningen team are freely available here. The scientists explain more in their abstract and authors' summary:
AbstractIf you're an intellectually honest creationist, if any such person exists, you must accept the inevitable consequence of your superstition. You must accept that any omniscient designer who designed both the human genome and the SARS-CoV-2 virus, must have known exactly what the effect of the virus and the resulting pandemic would have on particular individuals with particular combinations of genes, and designed it nonetheless. The only possible conclusion then would be that it deliberately targeted those individuals with the intention of making life more difficult for them than it otherwise would have been.
Physical and mental health are determined by an interplay between nature, for example genetics, and nurture, which encompasses experiences and exposures that can be short or long-lasting. The COVID-19 pandemic represents a unique situation in which whole communities were suddenly and simultaneously exposed to both the virus and the societal changes required to combat the virus. We studied 27,537 population-based biobank participants for whom we have genetic data and extensive longitudinal data collected via 19 questionnaires over 10 months, starting in March 2020. This allowed us to explore the interaction between genetics and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals’ wellbeing over time. We observe that genetics affected many aspects of wellbeing, but also that its impact on several phenotypes changed over time. Over the course of the pandemic, we observed that the genetic predisposition to life satisfaction had an increasing influence on perceived quality of life. We also estimated heritability and the proportion of variance explained by shared environment using variance components methods based on pedigree information and household composition. The results suggest that people’s genetic constitution manifested more prominently over time, potentially due to social isolation driven by strict COVID-19 containment measures. Overall, our findings demonstrate that the relative contribution of genetic variation to complex phenotypes is dynamic rather than static.
Author summary
All over the world we have experienced the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on our wellbeing. However, the impact may not have been the same for everyone. We know that physical and mental health are affected partly by nature, for example genetics, and partly by environmental factors, for example the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we explored the interaction between genetics and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals’ wellbeing over time. We observed that genetics not only influenced many aspects of wellbeing, but also that this impact changed over time during the pandemic. Our results suggest that the relative contribution of an individuals’ genetics increased over time. Overall, our findings demonstrate that the relative contribution of genetic variation to complex phenotypes, such as wellbeing, is dynamic rather than static.
Warmerdam CAR, Wiersma HH, Lanting P, Ani A, Lifelines Corona Research Initiative, Lifelines Cohort Study, et al. (2022)
Increased genetic contribution to wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
PLoS Genet 18(5): e1010135. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1010135
Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by PLoS. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
Either that or it had no idea what it was designing and what it would do and was behaving just like a mindless, uncaring and unthinking automaton or natural process.
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