Religie en de verspreiding van COVID-19 in Nederland

Het begin van de tweede golf (6 juli – 2 november)

Samenvatting

In this article, we explore the connection between religion and COVID-19 in the Netherlands or, more precisely, how the number of Muslims and Christians relates to the number of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 per municipality at the beginning of the second COVID-19 wave (6 July-2 November). Our expectation was that there is a positive relationship between the relative number of Muslims living in a municipality and the relative number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in that same municipality. This expectation was based on the notion that a substantial part of Dutch Muslims stand at a relative distance to society and display less confidence in politics and the government, which may result in less compliance with government measures to combat COVID-19. Christians, on the other hand, have an above-average confidence in all kinds of societal institutions such as the government. As a result, we expected a negative relationship between the relative number of Christians and the relative number of hospitalized patients in a municipality. Based on data from the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) regarding the number of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS) regarding religious affiliation, and also considering intermediate factors such as age, overweight, educational level and population density, we demonstrate that at the beginning of the second COVID-19 wave, there indeed is a positive relationship between the number of Muslims and the number of hospitalized patients per municipality. However, we did not find a positive, nor a negative, relationship between the number of Christians and the number of hospitalized patients.