Impacts of Cultural Difference on the Transmission of COVID-19Individualism vs. Collectivism

We propose a new perspective based on the collectivism vs. individualism cultural difference to understand the diverging transmission outcomes of COVID-19 between countries. Since individualism values personal freedom thus would less likely to make the collective action of staying at home and avoiding gathering activities. They would also less likely to accept quarantine and support compulsory measures such as lockdown. As a reaction to the public will, governments of individualistic societies would be more hesitant to take compulsory measures and lead to the delay of necessary responses. As a result, individualistic societies perform worse in the battle with COVID-19 than collectivistic societies. We test the proposed cultural perspective of transmission of COVID-19 with cross-country data based on the measurement of culture from Hofstede (2001). We find a significant impact of cultural difference on the transmission outcome of COVID-19 measured by both the confirmed cases per million capita, confirmed deaths per million capita, as well as the growth rate of confirmed cases. The finding remains robust among the data on different dates. We further find that cultural difference also explains the difference in government responses, which further impacts the transmission outcome of COVID-19.