Giving Compass' Take:

• Carolyn Orbann explains how cultural behavior is a factor that impacts how COVID-19 spreads through communities and cities. 

• Where have we seen positive community behavior that responds to COVID-19 challenges? What cities are leading by example?

• Understand more about class divide and inequalities during COVID-19. 

Carolyn Orbann, an associate teaching professor of health science in the School of Health Professions at the University of Missouri, studies how cultural behavior can play a role in the spread of infectious diseases.

Here, Orbann shares her insight on how cultural behaviors influence the spread of infectious diseases in human populations, including why this can help us understand the current spread of the COVID-19 virus and why the choice to go on spring break during a pandemic is a complex decision:

Why are cultural behaviors important to study when looking at how infectious diseases spread in human populations?

Culture is one of the most fundamental ways that shapes how we live in the world. We are both biological and cultural beings, so when a disease spreads through large parts of the world’s population, we can cope with that in both biological and cultural ways.

Our bodies will have biological reactions, but we as groups of people—Americans, Europeans, etc.—have our own cultural reactions. Those cultural reactions vary depending on how our families are structured, our way of life, our cosmologies, and our economic systems. The impact of the disease can be greater or lesser depending on the particular actions and behaviors of different groups.

How have cultural behaviors influenced the spread of infectious diseases in human populations? Are there a couple specific examples that you could share? 

Every major pandemic in human history has been exacerbated by cultural behavior in one way or another. For example, the 1918 influenza pandemic was negatively affected by population movements and censorship of the press due to wartime restrictions during World War I.

Read the full article about culture influences by Eric Stann at Futurity.