The spread of COVID-19 represents a global public health crisis, yet some nations were more effective than others at limiting the spread of the virus during the early stages of the pandemic. Here we show that institutional and cultural factors combine to partly explain these cross-cultural differences. Nations with tight cultures and efficient governments were the most effective at limiting COVID-19’s growth and mortality rates as of early April, and this interaction of cultural tightness and government efficiency is robust to controlling for underreporting of cases, economic development, inequality, median age, population density, climatological variation, and other dimensions of cross-cultural variation (collectivism, power distance, relational mobility). A formal evolutionary model explores the mechanism that may underlie our findings, suggesting that these cross-cultural trends may be associated with group variation in cooperation under conditions of high threat. These analyses shed light on why some nations contained COVID-19 more effectively than others.
The combination of low-dose perflubron with high-frequency oscillatory ventilation leads to more rapid improvement in arterial oxygenation than high-frequency oscillatory ventilation alone, in a piglet model of acute lung injury. Although the group receiving high-frequency oscillatory ventilation alone eventually achieved PaO2 values that were equivalent to the group receiving high-frequency ventilation and perflubron, the combination of perflubron with high-frequency oscillatory ventilation may permit effective oxygenation and ventilation at lower mean airway pressures by facilitating alveolar expansion and decreasing intrapulmonary shunt.
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