Below is a monthly update, marking key metrics and commentary in from mid-April to mid-May, the second month since lockdowns began.
Polling Round Up
A majority of 53% is still somewhat-to-very worried of contracting the virus, compared to 47% who are less worried. This is a worry decrease of 4 point from a month ago when it was 57%.
The country is split 50/50 on worried versus not worried about financial hardship. This is a 2% increase worry rating from last month, when 48% were worried about financial hardship.
Still, slightly more people are worried about getting sick than losing their livelihood.
The partisan split:
Generally, Democrats’ opinions reflect the general populace in seeing the sickness and finances as equal threats. While Republicans see the financial threat as more serious by nine point margin. This is a change from polling a month earlier when Democrats viewed the virus as more of a threat than the economy, and Republican’s viewed the threat equally.
By a ratio of two to one, those surveyed by Monmouth University in a poll released in the first week of May were more concerned about lifting restrictions too quickly rather than too slowly. And 56 percent said the more important factor should be making sure as few people get sick as possible, while 33 percent said it was more important to prevent the economy from sinking into a profound downturn.
The vast majority of laid-off or furloughed workers — 77 percent — expect to be rehired by their previous employer once the stay-at-home orders in their area are lifted, according to a nationwide Washington Post-Ipsos poll.
WaPo-Ipsos Poll: A 74 percent majority of Americans overall say the United States should keep trying to slow the spread of the coronavirus even if it means keeping many businesses closed, while 25 percent say the country should open up businesses and get the economy going again, even if the result would be more infections. Yet there is a significant partisan divide on this question. More than 9 in 10 (92 percent) Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they favor closures to deal with the virus, while Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are split almost evenly, with 49 percent saying closures should be the top priority and 50 percent saying businesses should be opened up again.
A majority of Americans (61%) say the federal government is mostly (40%) or entirely (21%) responsible in making sure there are enough COVID-19 tests available to the public. About four-in-ten (37%) say this responsibility at least mostly falls on the state government.
In the fivethirthyeight aggregate of polls:
Americans Worried Concerned about infection declines 5.6 points to 68%
Americans Concerned about economy stayed the same at 86%
Disapproval of Trump’s response climbed above a majority this month for the first time: 52%. The approve-disapprove spread expanded from 1 point to 9 points more disapprove.
Scope of the Challenge & Government Response
Here are expert predictions about how long it will take to produce a vaccine.
On a federal effort, the calls continue for more action: “We need a national commitment to get this [contact tracing and testing] done in order to defeat the virus,” said Michael Leavitt, a former Republican governor of Utah and health secretary in the George W. Bush administration.
In some cases the FDA is making it harder to do contact tracing and testing, by ordering a pause on a promising Seattle program: The program involved sending home test kits to both healthy and sick people in the hope of conducting the kind of widespread monitoring that could help communities safely reopen from lockdowns. Researchers and public health authorities already had tested thousands of samples, finding dozens of previously undetected cases.
“Please discontinue patient testing and return of diagnostic results to patients until proper authorization is obtained,” the F.D.A. wrote in a memo.
By the end of February, those researchers ended up doing some testing anyway, discovered the first case of community transmission in the region and provided key evidence that the virus had most likely been circulating for weeks…. The issue in the Seattle case appears to be that the test results are being used not only by researchers for surveillance of the virus in the community but that the results are also being returned to patients to inform them.
A Harvard Global Health Institute report last week estimated that the United States needed to be conducting at least 900,000 tests daily, but tracking reports indicate the country is doing about one-third that amount.
The White House raised numerous objections to the CDC report on how to reopen sectors of society. A brief history of the CDC recommendations. First from the Washington Post: “April 16, when Trump and Birx released their guidelines for a slow and staggered return to normal in places with minimal cases of the coronavirus, many of the details fine-tuned by the CDC were stripped out. The CDC circulated a 17-page document with strong recommendations, but many in the White House resisted, particularly when it came to restricting parishioners from singing in choirs or sharing hymnals and offering plates, and suggesting that restaurants use digital menus and avoid salad bars. The document has not been made public and is still in the editing process.” That was Saturday. By Thursday, it was reported that the CDC report would not be released at all due to White House objections.”
The White House shelved the CDC plan for reopening safely: “White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said Friday that the documents had not been approved by CDC Director Robert Redfield. The new emails, however, show that Redfield cleared the guidance.”
Fauci testified before the Senate on May 12: What I’ve expressed then and again is my concern that if some areas, cities, states or what have you jump over those various checkpoints and prematurely open up without having the capability of being able to respond effectively and efficiently — my concern is that we will start to see little spikes that might turn into outbreaks.”
According to David Grahm, in mid May: Yet the Trump administration still has no plan for dealing with the global pandemic or its fallout. The president has cast doubt on the need for a vaccine or expanded testing. He has no evident plan for contact tracing. He has no treatment ideas beyond the drug remdesivir, since Trump’s marketing campaign for hydroxychloroquine ended in disaster. And, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, the White House has no plan for that, either, beyond a quixotic hope that consumer demand will snap back as soon as businesses reopen.
Political Weirding
The New York Times editorial pages two leading progressive columnists, both equating the current crisis to the Great Depression with the potential for 21st Century labor’s New Deal.
Goldberg: “We are going to be faced with a national rebuilding project at a scale that has never existed in our lifetimes,” said Yang. The biggest battle in politics now is over who will control that project, and whom it will prioritize.
Bouie: It’s true these actions have been limited in scope and scale. But if they continue, and if they increase, they may come to represent the first stirrings of something much larger. The consequential strike wave of 1934 — which paved the way for the National Labor Relations Act and created new political space for serious government action on behalf of labor — was presaged by a year of unrest in workplaces across the country, from factories and farms to newspaper offices and Hollywood sets.
J.V. Last compares the impact of COVID-19 with Vietnam: But the most striking similarity is the presence of other large-scale societal changes that threaten to interact with the pandemic…. These trends move only somewhat independently of one another. In the months ahead, COVID-19 is going to shape and be shaped by all of them in some ways that can be foreseen. But mostly in ways that cannot…. three months into the COVID-19 crisis, most Americans have yet to internalize the magnitude of the change that could come from it.
In Edsell’s early May round ups, he quotes political scientist Eric Kaufman: “My view is that Covid-19 weakens national populism because it reduces cultural threat. a) cuts immigration, b) cuts globalization, c) raises the profile of health care and the economy, two material issues, and reduces the profile of culture war issues which drive right populism, d) compels faith in experts, making it riskier to entrust “burn it all down” populists with power and e) focuses on the (relatively diverse and foreign-born) health care workers as heroes.”
There was also more discussion this month of COVID-19 and racism.
Bouie on COVID-19 protests and race: The vast majority of these protesters — like the vast majority of those who want to prematurely reopen the economy — are white. This is in stark contrast to the victims of Covid-19 (who are disproportionately black and brown), as well as those who have lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic (who are also disproportionately black and brown), as well as those who have been or will be forced to work — or work more — as a result of reopening (the service workers and laborers who are again disproportionately black and brown). More than just burdensome, the restrictions become an intolerable violation of the social contract as these Americans understand it. They run against the meaning of their racial identity, of the freedom and autonomy it is supposed to signify. And they resolve the violation by asserting the other aspect of white freedom, the right of control.
Sewer on the same topic: Over the weeks that followed the declaration of an emergency, the pandemic worsened and the death toll mounted. Yet by mid-April, conservative broadcasters were decrying the restrictions, small bands of armed protesters were descending on state capitols, and the president was pressing to lift the constraints. In the interim, data about the demographics of COVID-19 victims began to trickle out. On April 7, major outlets began reporting that preliminary data showed that black and Latino Americans were being disproportionately felled by the coronavirus.
This is a very old and recognizable story—political and financial elites displaying a callous disregard for the workers of any race who make their lives of comfort possible. But in America, where labor and race are so often intertwined, the racial contract has enabled the wealthy to dismiss workers as both undeserving and expendable. White Americans are also suffering, but the perception that the coronavirus is largely a black and brown problem licenses elites to dismiss its impact. In America, the racial contract has shaped the terms of class war for centuries; the COVID contract shapes it here.
Finally, on Saturday night May 16 Obama delivered a brief national high school commencement address in which he gave his take on the current situation:
- “All of which means that you’re going to have to grow up faster than some generations. This pandemic has shaken up the status quo and laid bare a lot of our country’s deep-seated problems — from massive economic inequality to ongoing racial disparities to a lack of basic health care for people who need it. It’s woken a lot of young people up to the fact that the old ways of doing things just don’t work; that it doesn’t matter how much money you make if everyone around you is hungry and sick; and that our society and our democracy only work when we think not just about ourselves, but about each other.”
- It’s also pulled the curtain back on another hard truth, something that we all have to eventually accept once our childhood comes to an end. All those adults that you used to think were in charge and knew what they were doing? Turns out that they don’t have all the answers. A lot of them aren’t even asking the right questions. So, if the world’s going to get better, it going to be up to you.
- …do what you think is right. Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy — that’s how little kids think. Unfortunately, a lot of so-called grown-ups, including some with fancy titles and important jobs, still think that way — which is why things are so screwed up.
Questions Going Forward
When will the need for massive federal intervention in the crisis become apparent to most Americans, if at all?
- Polling on this quoted above indicates the public believes in this need.
When will economic fears overcome fears of the virus? Will fears of the virus–and thus support for the lockdowns–fade?
- Fear is moving away from the virus and toward economy, though majorities still fear the virus.
Will the anti-lockdown protests grow to Tea Party size and cultural status?
- Protests seemed to have fizzled, though nearly all governors regardless of political persuasion are moving slowly toward reopening. No Tea Party moment yet.