In China, wearing masks during an epidemic is a readily accepted practice — unlike the situation in, say, the United States or some European countries, where the issue of mask-wearing is revealing civic and political fault lines. To what extent are these differences attributable to the “culture” of each country? And how much have widespread social norms affected the responses of different countries during the Covid-19 pandemic? Those were among the leading questions driving an MIT public forum on Tuesday, as leading scholars from the Institute examined the connections between…
