Cultural Tightness Speeds up the Effects of Anti-epidemic Policies on Controlling COVID-19 Prevalence

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 has been becoming a vital challenge for human society. With the outbreaks of the COVID-19 epidemic, the governments of multiple countries announced and enacted various anti-epidemic policies to deal with it. The present research proposed that cultural tightness, which is a basic cultural dimension to evaluate how strictly the social norms are abided by people in a society, could accelerate the effects of the anti-epidemic policies on constraints of the transmission of COVID-19. In specific, the new confirmed cases would be reduced by anti-epidemic policies in the tighter societies much earlier than the looser ones. In this work, we used cross-correlation analysis to investigate and analyze the leading and lagging associations between the stringency of anti-epidemic policies and the number of new confirmed cases among the usual tight and loose countries. The findings revealed that the severity of anti-epidemic policies is negatively correlated with the number of new confirmed cases in general. Moreover, cultural tightness does impact the effectiveness of the anti-epidemic policies on the constraints of COVID-19;that is, the lag weeks of new confirmed cases predicted by the stringency of anti-epidemic policies in the tight countries are significantly shorter than that of the loose countries. The control and prevention of COVID-19 around the world is far from optimistic, meanwhile the findings of the current research highlighted the role of cultural factors in the encounter with the century epidemic of human mankind. © 2021 IEEE