It’s the same in China. My wife’s family is from there, and they hand out antibiotics for everything. Everyone seems to have a stash of them as well.

When my in-laws were visiting Australia for a couple of months and my wife’s mother got a minor cold, she started demanding we get her some antibiotics. We tried to explain that there’s no way a doctor would prescribe them for a minor sniffle, and she totally went if the deep end, acting as if she was going to die if she didn’t get them. But in the end, she survived.