The Folly of Asians Relying on Their Cultures to Prevent the Further Spread of COVID-19

The biggest news of the year that just passed is no doubt the global spread of COVID-19. Media outlets and people around the world have over time became front and center in a historical moment, as a global pandemic, unprecedented in the lifetimes of most of today's residents on Earth, ravaged nations and economies around the world, disrupting everyday life. As different states came face-to-face with the speed with which the virus claimed the lives of their citizens, the media coverage increasingly centered on how the disease seemed to take on different trajectories in different places, hurting some countries much more than others.

Western media, in particular, has in particular been in shock that while Asian countries managed to suppress the spread of COVID, their own countries have seen multiple waves of the pandemic leading to record high infections, with many jumping to the conclusion that Asia's "collectivist" cultures, with more emphasis on individuals adhering to rules about social distancing and mask-wearing without complaints, lies beyond the discrepancy in COVID's relative fatalities in the two regions. In their eyes, Asian governments, utilizing their citizens' relative respect for science and willingness to tolerate intrusive privacy violations associated with contact tracing, allowed Asia to tackle the pandemic more successfully than other places around the world.

The cultural-centric narrative is problematic from the very beginning, not the least because it neglects differences among different cultures within Asia, and dismiss that each Asian person, even within one country, can have a different understanding of how his or her culture pertains to the fight against COVID. But perhaps more importantly, it glorifies Asian culture in a way that makes Asians themselves complacent, ignoring the aspects of their cultures that harm their positions in the still very much ongoing battle against COVID, in favor of meekly accepting that Asian cultures are somehow universally good for keeping the disease at bay.

That complacency about the potential harm of Asian cultures is on full display in a normally festive season like the New Year's. For any "collectivist" culture, gathering together extended family members and sharing large meals over one table under one roof is considered the norm. Preparing for the festive meals involve rubbing shoulders with strangers in crowded trains, buses, and supermarkets, in ways that make normally crowded Asian metropolises even denser with people, and make a mockery of social distancing. Despite calls from governments around the region to forego large group gatherings now, Asian cultures simply would no allow people to stay entirely away from each other at this time of the year.

Nowhere does Asians' normally rule-adhering, social distance-respecting nature contrast more greatly with their crowd-favoring festive selves than in all the celebrations of New Year's. Japanese supermarkets were crowded with several times their volume of shoppers on New Year's Eve, as people stock up for shops' closing in the coming three days of the first long weekend of the year. While Japanese people normally have set meals where individuals only eat from their own bowls, many shoppers on New Year's Eve were stocking up on big platters of sashimi, sushi, and vegetables for communal bowls, all to be directly picked up from the same place by many people at the same table. 

And despite the local government's call for people to celebrate new year's at home, many well-wishers thronged their neighborhood shrines and temples for the first prayers of the year. No doubt many were wishing for the pandemic to go away, but as many people queued and crowded into normally empty courtyards and halls, they are perhaps faced with greater risk of contracting the illness than any time in 2020, when working from home and limited entry in shops were the norm. These aspects of Asian cultures, as integral as following authority and science, will hurt the region's ability to keep its winning streak against the virus going in the first days of 2021.

Instead of blindly extolling the virtues of Asian cultures in battling the virus, perhaps in this new year of battling COVID, both government authorities and the general public can take a more nuanced approach in understanding what cultural elements, no matter what their origins, can be beneficial, and cherry-pick them for implementation. A good example is a now near-universal adoption of lockdowns, a government policy that Western media dismissed as incompatible with "individualistic, freedom-loving" Westerners when the Chinese government first adopted it to quarantine the city of Wuhan. During a life-or-death emergency like COVID, whatever policy that is effective, no matter of what cultural origin, should be universally adopted.

And this propensity to adopt cultural traits from other places around the world should apply equally to the Asian government, who mistakingly believe that their cultural values give them a natural moat against the further spread of COVID. Many Japanese companies, for instance, have been too rash in forcing employees to be physically present in the office, even in a limited capacity. Changing the Asian culture of corporate presenteeism, marked by face-to-face meetings, need to be deprioritized in favor of rapidly adopting remote work technologies. Reexamining Asian cultures for their deficiencies in the battle against COVID will become increasingly necessary as the region is hit with a record number of cases and new, faster-spreading COVID varients.