Having worked internationally, particularly with responsibility for teams in many European countries I am not surprised by the attitudinal differences. Understanding this was the bread and butter for me in managing teams in different countries sometimes on the same project.
I have been tracking the John Hopkins statistics for a while, particularly to understand where the UK sits statistically among our European friends. I used the figures of cases and deaths per million, but focused on deaths because there was sufficient similarity of recording across different countries countries. The first thing that struck me was the very marked difference in deaths per million between north and south in Western Europe, but then noticed the very low figures in Eastern Europe too. So I superimposed the number of deaths per million on a map of Europe and there was a very large difference between south and west compared with north and east. In fact a diagonal line drawn through Amsterdam and Venice neatly separates countries with high and low death rates - at or well below 100 d/m (as low as 25 d/m) on one side to over 200 d/m (up to 700 d/m). Sweden is an an increasing anomaly, much worse than its neighbours (probably due to little lockdown) and Portugal. So why this stark geographic difference ? I also plotted a map with minimum January temperatures (start of the epidemics) and that almost exactly correlated with the diagonal line - below zero to north and east (across to the Balkans and Bulgaria) and above zero to the south and west - but temperature can't be the factor because it appears the virus is not affected by low temperature. I don't understand - unless there is a secondary factor such as people wearing gloves more when the minimum temperature is low (??!!). Nevertheless this geographic split is very significant - if inexplicable.
Having worked internationally, particularly with responsibility for teams in many European countries I am not surprised by the attitudinal differences. Understanding this was the bread and butter for me in managing teams in different countries sometimes on the same project.
I have been tracking the John Hopkins statistics for a while, particularly to understand where the UK sits statistically among our European friends. I used the figures of cases and deaths per million, but focused on deaths because there was sufficient similarity of recording across different countries countries. The first thing that struck me was the very marked difference in deaths per million between north and south in Western Europe, but then noticed the very low figures in Eastern Europe too. So I superimposed the number of deaths per million on a map of Europe and there was a very large difference between south and west compared with north and east. In fact a diagonal line drawn through Amsterdam and Venice neatly separates countries with high and low death rates - at or well below 100 d/m (as low as 25 d/m) on one side to over 200 d/m (up to 700 d/m). Sweden is an an increasing anomaly, much worse than its neighbours (probably due to little lockdown) and Portugal. So why this stark geographic difference ? I also plotted a map with minimum January temperatures (start of the epidemics) and that almost exactly correlated with the diagonal line - below zero to north and east (across to the Balkans and Bulgaria) and above zero to the south and west - but temperature can't be the factor because it appears the virus is not affected by low temperature. I don't understand - unless there is a secondary factor such as people wearing gloves more when the minimum temperature is low (??!!). Nevertheless this geographic split is very significant - if inexplicable.