I assumed that you have a numeric variable (number of COVID-19 positive cases in this case) and you want to compared mean among four groups (4pt likert scale in this case). If so, ANOVA would be preferred. Please also visit this link

Choosing the Right Statistical Test | Types and Examples:

https://www.scribbr.com/statistics/statistical-tests/

Thank you so much.

You can use common tests like Kendall, Pearson, and Spearman. For the Pearson test, check the normality presumption.

https://www.statisticshowto.com/probability-and-statistics/correlation-analysis/

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Hi Kamil,

I hope you are doing well! The most direct and appropriate analysis for just finding the correlation between one ordinal (pseudoscience theories) and one continuous (number of cases) would be Kendall's coefficient of rank correlations.

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Here is a good resource.

Hope this helps!

Best,

Bryant

The fastest approach is to use ranks, as mentioned above.

I think you should start with side-by-side boxplots to show the distribution of the sqrt- or log-transformed number of positive cases depending on what you have on the Likert scale. For more powerful test, you can use regression where Y is the sqrt- or log-transformed number of positive cases and X modelled using dummy variables.