Culture and COVID-19: Don’t Throw Your Elderly Away!

Abstract Enormous differences exist in rates of death from COVID-19 in countries around the world. Collectivist cultures and countries are characterized by concern for culture and country to a greater extent than for self-interest, whereas the reverse is true for individualistic cultures and countries. In light of this cultural difference, and suggestive evidence that cultures known for their collectivist orientation are more likely to have near-universal compliance with infection-preventive behaviors such as public mask-wearing and less likely to place their elderly in nursing homes (which account for a high proportion of deaths in individualistic countries such as the US, Canada, and the UK), we hypothesized that death per million (DPM) rates would be significantly lower for collectivist countries than individualistic countries. We categorized every country for which there are collectivist-individualistic scores and split the countries into two groups as defined by Hofstede’s (1980) cut-offs. As predicted, the DPM rate for collectivist countries was significantly lower than for individualistic countries. Furthermore, an analysis of covariance controlling for median age showed that the alternative explanation that the observed difference could be accounted for in terms of the significantly lower average age of citizens of collectivist countries was implausible. Implications in areas related to reopening schools, etc., and directions for future research are discussed.