Below is a monthly update, marking key metrics and commentary in from mid-May to mid-June, the third month since lockdowns began.
Polling Round Up
According to Gallop tracking polls, the number of Americas who are worried about catching the virus has declined for the second month in a row, from a high of 57% in mid-April to 49% in mid-June. However the drop was only two points this month, compared to 6 points last month. A more significant shift was need in the financial hardship question. Last month the number of Americans somewhat-to-very worried about financial hardship increased five points over the month before. This month that number dropped 9 points. Only 44% are concerned about their personal financial situation, down from 53% last month.
In the fivethirtyeight average of polls, there was a similar decline in the number concerned about catching the virus (64% down 3.7%). On the larger questions of Americans concerned about economy: 84% are some/very concerned, down 1.9% from last month.
Disapproval of Trump’s response continues to climb, with disproval/approval at 54%/42%. The disapproval margin is now 12.1%, up from -9.2% in Mary and -1.1 in April.
Political Weirding
The most significant event this month was the police murder of George Floyd on Memorial Day and the ensuing weeks of protest that brought huge crowds into the streets across the country and sparked debate over how serious the COVID-19 lockdowns and social distancing measures can be going forward.
However, in the week before that, here is some of what the conversation was about:
A New York Times piece on Biden moving toward a more expansive agenda: Democratic leaders say that if they hold power next January, they must be prepared to move to pump trillions more into the economy; enact infrastructure and climate legislation far larger than they previously envisioned; pass a raft of aggressive worker-protection laws; expand government-backed health insurance and create enormous new investments in public-health jobs, health care facilities and child care programs…. “There is a recognition that this event is more transformative than 2008, more transformative than 9/11, more transformative than the fall of the Berlin Wall,” said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a centrist Democrat.
The Republican governor of Ohio Mike Dewine wrote this on Twitter Monday May 18: We are marshaling all the resources at our disposal to assemble a large contingent of law enforcement and health officials from across state agencies and from our local communities. We will coordinate with them as part of the Department of Public Safety’s Ohio Investigative Unit. They will surge in to conduct safety compliance checks in crowded bars and restaurants.
Nursing homes where those groups make up a significant portion of the residents — no matter their location, no matter their size, no matter their government rating — have been twice as likely to get hit by the coronavirus as those where the population is overwhelmingly white.
Here is an account of what one New Jersey town is doing to successfully contact trace 90% of their COVID-19 cases.
Early June saw new stages of reopening across the country, including Las Vegas: Vegas reopened casinos over the weekend: Dealers and players are separated by Plexiglas, dice are doused in sanitizer after every throw, and guests, encouraged though not required to wear masks, are subject to mandatory temperature checks.
In NYC, the first phase of reopening began on Monday, with construction cites and retail stores. The case count is low enough “for New York City’s corps of contract tracers, who began work last week, to try to track every close interaction and, officials hope, stop a resurgence of the virus.”
News of increasing case counts in certain states: Since the start of June, 14 states and Puerto Rico have recorded their highest-ever seven-day average of new coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, according to data tracked by The Washington Post: : Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Carolina, Mississippi, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.
The second week of June as a time of great (pessimistic) reflection on our collective battle against the virus.
Douthat: With this last turn, we’ve reached the end of the progression, because it means the original theory behind a stern public health response — that the danger to life and health justified suspending even the most righteous pursuits, including not just normal economic life but the practices and institutions that protect children, comfort the dying, serve the poor — has been abandoned or subverted by every faction in our national debate. … [which] does signal that there will be no further comprehensive attempt to fight the virus. Trump and conservatism won’t support it, the public health bureaucracy won’t be able to defend it, and we didn’t use the time the lockdowns bought to build the infrastructure to sustain a campaign of actual suppression.
Writing in The Atlantic: These numbers all reflect infections that likely began before this week of protest. An even larger spike now seems likely. Put another way: If the country doesn’t see a substantial increase in new COVID-19 cases after this week, it should prompt a rethinking of what epidemiologists believe about how the virus spreads…. If so, it won’t be because the United States made concerted, coordinated decisions about how to balance the horrors of the pandemic and the frustration of pausing everyday life. Instead, the United States has moved from attempting to beat the virus to managing the harm of losing.
