By Jessica Newfield (MPA Candidate ‘21)

On January 30th 2020, World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared coronavirus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). Five weeks later, COVID-19 was labelled a pandemic. On March 11th, in a briefing in Geneva, the WHO Director General expressed his concern for “the alarming levels of spread, severity, and inaction”. This pivotal period begs the question of why COVID-19 was taken more seriously in some countries than others. Could cultural context play a role in shaping national health responses?

On March 25th, the New Zealand government announced alert level 4. All non-essential stores were required to shut down and for the first time in history, borders were closed to all but New Zealand citizens and permanent residents. Thankfully for me and other travelers who happened to be in New Zealand at the time, our visas were automatically extended for 3-6 months. I had to let go of my apartment in Valencia, Spain, and find a way to ship my belongings to my family in Paris, France. Though I no longer had an official home, I was happily stranded in New Zealand, the country with one of the lowest Covid-19 death rates per capita worldwide to date in the pandemic and whose Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s leadership has been internationally recognized for its humanity and effectiveness. 

As I followed from afar the news coming from different corners of the world, I was struck by the difference in political rhetoric around public health measures. While political conversations in the US, France, Spain, UK, Germany, India and Brazil focused on trade-offs between saving lives and saving the economy, dialogues in New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, China, Singapore, and Taiwan centered more around the efficacy of public safety measures in eradicating the virus completely. Simply put, some countries emphasized more how to continue to live despite the virus while others focused more on how to collectively prioritize ending its spread. 

“Do we follow the guidelines of the medical scientific community unquestioningly, as they come from authoritative sources, or do we screen the information and act accordingly, even at the cost of deviating from the imposed rules?” 

That’s the question that Dutch organizational theorist and cross-cultural communication expert Fons Trompenaars poses in his book about how to deal with the dilemmas caused by COVID-19. In his model of national culture differences, Trompenaars identifies seven cultural dimensions which are relevant to understanding diverging national and local responses to coronavirus: 

1. Global causes with local answers (Universalism vs. Particularism)

2. Individual freedom vs. collective solidarity (Individualism vs. Communitarianism)

3. Controlling emotions vs. showing emotions (Neutral vs. Affective)

4. Focusing on specific issues vs. looking at the whole system (Specific vs. Diffuse)

5. Challenging authorities vs. respecting authorities (Achievement vs. Ascription)

6. Short-term solutions vs. long-term immunity (Short vs. Long Term)

7, Controlling the virus vs. going with the flow (Internal vs. External Control)

For example, Asian cultures’ general propensity towards communitarianism translated into stricter COVID-19 responses and more drastic early decreases in cases. Many countries in the Asia-Pacific region entrust central government with full intervention in different domains such as technology development, business, and health. It is normalized for authorities to step in and take responsibility for solving the problem at hand. South Korea was successful in implementing a centralized contact tracing system that also addressed privacy concerns with its pseudonymized app. Moreover, intervention in this context is apolitical, not attached to a specific political party but framed as serving a collective goal. 

In contrast, individualism-leaning countries such as in North and Latin America and Europe, deploy a rhetoric that is more politicized and appeals to the value of personal freedom and individual rights. In this context, we saw war analogies being used alike by US President Trump, France’s President Macron, UK Prime Minister Johnson, and Brazil’s Bolsonaro to further their localized approaches to public health and safety measures. By rallying citizens to beat an external threat, an “invisible enemy”, this us versus them mentality gives a sense of internal stability in opposition to diverging tactics to solve the problem. This translates into more discrepancies in measures rolled out locally and regionally, and continued public debate and negotiation with different stakeholders. 

Another useful cultural framework to make sense of diverging COVID-19 responses is Hofstede’s cultural dimensions of uncertainty avoidance and power distance. The Hofstede Institute explains: “Uncertainty Avoidance has to do with the way that a society deals with the fact that the future can never be known: should we try to control the future or just let it happen? This ambiguity brings with it anxiety, and different cultures have learned to deal with this anxiety in different ways. The extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations and have created beliefs and institutions that try to avoid these”. Lower scoring countries on the Uncertainty Avoidance Index (i.e. the UK, China and the US) feel more comfortable with uncertainty, while higher scoring countries (i.e. Italy, Russia, France) have a greater need for certainty, for predicting the future and receiving reassurance. Hence, uncertainty is also a culturally relative concept. 

In addition, Hofstede’s Power Distance Index, defined as “the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally", gives us insights into the variation in social acceptance of public health policies. Latin American, Asian and some African countries demonstrate higher power distance scores, while Germanic countries, including Anglophone countries, show lower power distance scores.

We can see how these concepts of uncertainty avoidance and power distance manifest in our daily lives in conversations with close ones. MPP student Jigyasa Sharma shares about her family’s experience in India: “My mother was always very careful and stayed home most of the time.  My father stayed at home for a month during the lockdown imposed by the government but eventually he had to step out of the house for his work (he is in construction). Even then my father took all the precautions (i.e. mask, 6-ft, sanitizer). Despite all the precautions they both took they got COVID. Things got really bad but fortunately, they recovered. This was pretty much the most traumatic experience of my life.”

“The government was very strict with stay-at-home orders in the initial months, however these restrictions were relaxed over time. Fast forward to today: there are effectively no restrictions being enforced. People are having lavish weddings and celebrating fancy birthday parties in restaurants (with no mask in sight). While I am appalled by how social norms are more important than public safety (...) I'd also like to note that the government is not entirely to be blamed. Unlike the US and European countries, India cannot afford lockdowns as there are millions of people who depend on daily wages. Lockdown leaves them with no food to eat. So the attitude among the poor in India is - you either die from hunger or from the disease and they would choose the latter.” 

Clearly, some communities don’t have the luxury of long-term planning. If citizens’ survival is not even guaranteed through a social safety net from the government, how can we expect them to feel the same personal responsibility to public health?

The trust we feel towards authorities is deeply impacted by a government's clarity of messaging and ability to follow through on its promises. MPP student Lily Nienstedt shares about her parents’ experience in Germany: “My parents live in Germany and though I have no idea when I’ll get to see them next, I feel grateful because I feel like it is safer there and will remain safer there.  Even though case rates at times have increased in Germany, the government has been so much more consistent, and Germans seem to be following guidelines at a much higher rate - probably because the messaging has been super clear. Wearing a mask is not as political in Germany. And there’s a stronger social safety net. My aunt works at a small store and when they had to close they received federal money to continue to pay her. So the store didn’t go under and she also got paid and could be safe. They also have consistently provided unemployment insurance, and every citizen has healthcare in Germany. That makes it so much easier for people to stay home and get care when needed.” 

“This fall as things got worse, the priority seems to always have been “keep kids in schools”. They closed down all dining and most stores in October because rates were going up and they wanted to keep schools open. And all businesses were given 75% of their revenue to ensure that the shut-down wouldn’t hurt them. The federal government did that, and pretty quickly and fairly unanimously, too. Can you imagine that here [US]? I’m definitely really sad to see how much better their government has handled this. I know from talking to my parents that folks over there just shake their head when they talk about the US response. It’s really unfathomable to them that our government has done so little.”

COVID-19 is a global reality which is why cross-cultural understanding is more important than ever for improving transnational communication and reconciling our differences on the issue. As countries rush at different excitement levels to test and disseminate vaccines, our ability to understand and better navigate our different cultural environments will ultimately determine our success in 2021 for collectively managing the resources required to put an end to COVID- 19.