Cultural differences, intergenerational contacts, and the spread of Covid-19: Evidence from Swiss language regions

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic displayed large variations between and within countries in the speed of contagion and in observed fatality rates. This work sheds light on the role of social ties in old age, exploiting the high cultural variation between German-speaking and Latin- (French- and Italian-) speaking regions in Switzerland. We show that older adults in Latin-speaking regions exhibit a larger social network and more intergenerational contacts than their German-speaking counterparts. These differences are consistent with the heterogeneous incidence of the disease across language regions. Even controlling for several determinants of the contagion, we find large differences in the incidence of Covid-19 among older adults, in both the first and second waves of the pandemic. These findings also hold when exploiting language variations within the three Swiss bilingual cantons. We rule out the possibility that our results are driven by differences in canton-specific policies or in citizens’ compliance with containment measures.

Keywords:

• Covid-19
• culture
• intergenerational contacts
• policy compliance
• Switzerland

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Please direct all correspondence to Fabrizio Mazzonna, Institute of Economics (IdEP), Università della Svizzera italiana, via Buffi 13, Lugano, 6900, Switzerland; or by E-mail: [email protected].

2 Data availability: Aggregated data on the weekly number of Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in Switzerland for different age groups (in 10-year bins) at the canton level are publicly available at the website of the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/overview). District-level data on the weekly number of Covid-19 cases are publicly available for the cantons of Fribourg (https://www.fr.ch/sante/covid-19/coronavirus-statistiques-evolution-de-la-situation-dans-le-canton) and Valais (https://www.vs.ch/web/coronavirus/statistiques-hebdomadaires). For the Canton of Bern, they were kindly provided by the Directorate of Health, Social Affairs, and Integration (https://www.gsi.be.ch/fr/start.html). Data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) are provided free of charge for scientific use after registration (http://www.share-project.org/data-access.html). Canton-level data from Google’s Community Mobility Reports are publicly available (https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/). The same holds for SOTOMO opinion polls (https://sotomo.ch/site/). All canton-level socio-economic variables provided by the Federal Statistical Office are publicly available (https://www.atlas.bfs.admin.ch/de/index.html).