A small global village: the effects of collectivist, tight and Confucian cultures on the spread of COVID-19

While previous studies have emphasised several important factors associated with the spread of COVID-19 and strategies to reduce transmission, few studies have focused on the social and cultural factors that may influence its spread. This study analyses the spread of COVID-19 from a cross-country/region cultural perspective and finds that countries and regions with a collectivistic, Confucian or tight (restrictive) culture experience a lower spread rate of COVID-19. The results are robust to controlling for several factors, including population, age structure, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, previous SARS occurrence, smoking prevalence, and religion. A one standard deviation increase in the collectivism score is associated with a 1.38% reduction of the weekly growth rate of COVID-19 cases. More importantly, the effect of culture on the spread of COVID-19 becomes stronger during national or regional lockdowns. Corroborating these main results, supporting analyses find a significant effect of culture on national and regional COVID-19 death rates. These findings suggest that to manage the ongoing surges in COVID-19 outbreaks, governments should implement public health policies that emphasise the ideas of common interest, personal responsibility and strong cultural norms, and sense of community, as this pandemic has revealed that people all live together in a small global village. Why did Korea, Japan & Taiwan have so few deaths? I see face-covering and the Confucian idea of common good as key. –Michael Levitt, the Nobel Prize Laureate (2020)