The Virtues of Conformity?

Why is Canada doing so better than the USA with COVID-19? The US has 16,364 cases per million population, and 515 deaths p.m.. Canada has 3,209 cases per million, and 239 deaths p.m.. Yet the two countries are next to each other, and culturally similar.

It may have to do with the larger Black and Hispanic populations in the US; dark-skinned people are more vulnerable to the virus, probably because of a deficit of vitamin D. Obesity is also more common in the US, and this is a risk factor for the coronavirus. A leftist friend wants to credit the difference to Canada’s government health insurance, but I don’t see any plausible argument for that.

A Chinese student has a theory. It’s due to good old American individualism. If the US government tells people to stay apart or wear a mask, Americans start to riot. In some other countries—he is thinking of China, but it applies to Canada—people are far more inclined to do as they are told by government or experts.

Canadians are famously law-abiding and orderly: in the much-quoted words of the original Canadian constitution, not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but “peace, order, and good government.”

The same thesis seems to make sense of the German experience in comparison to Italy, Spain, or the UK. Italians are always disorderly, and I imagine Spaniards too. The English are individualistic, like the Americans, and unusually tolerant of eccentricity.

This serves to explain again the lower levels of contagion in the Far East. We cannot trust the Chinese figures, but Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have all had an easier time of it; and all are notably for the sense of social cohesion and going along with the group, if not the government. Compare the Philippines, which has absorbed some of the American and the Spanish model, and so is more individualistic: higher numbers.

It may be that the virus has exposed a problem with that approach.

But the game is not over yet.