Covid-19 Reveals Deep and Familiar Divides. NewsWire

NewsWire: 10/7/21

• Most Americans still consider Covid-19 a major threat, but there are wide divides by vaccination status and partisanship. This divide applies to basically every issue related to the pandemic, including opinions on the need for restrictions and mandates. (Pew Research Center)
• NH: There is one thing that Americans can agree on when it comes to Covid-19: that it remains a major threat to the economy. Comparable shares of Democrats and Republicans (75% and 69%, respectively) and vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans (74% and 67%) agree.
• But that’s where the similarities end. For the rest of Pew’s questions, answers vary hugely by partisanship and vaccination status, which are themselves closely intertwined. Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to have gotten at least one dose (86% vs. 60%) and to support a broad range of public health measures to control the pandemic, including vaccine mandates to fly on an airplane, attend college in person, eat in restaurants, and shop in-store.
• The majority of Republicans support limiting international travel and requiring masks on public transit, but oppose all other measures. They’re also far less likely to be worried about catching Covid-19 or spreading it to others unknowingly. However, here vaccination status matters: Vaccinated Republicans are much more likely than their unvaccinated counterparts to support vaccine mandates for air travel and attending events and school.
• Overall, just under half (45%) of Americans say they worry about catching Covid-19 and needing hospitalization. But this rate is much lower for whites (35%) than it is for any other racial or ethnic group. Young people (ages 18 to 29) are less worried about catching Covid-19 than older Americans, but not by much. The spread across age groups is less than 10 percentage points, which as we’ve pointed out before, does not reflect young people’s actual relative mortality risk. (See “Why Generations React Differently to Covid-19.”) Remarkably, 18- to 29-year-olds are also the most concerned about spreading the virus to others.

• Across all demographic groups, vaccination rates are the lowest among white evangelical Americans: 57% are vaccinated, compared to 73% of Americans overall. Early in the pandemic, black and Hispanic Americans were less likely than whites to have been vaccinated. But now that gap has narrowed or closed: 70% of blacks, 72% of whites, and 76% of Hispanics have gotten the jab. Asian Americans lead in vaccination rates at 94%.

• What does this mean for the future of the pandemic? The public is largely united on only three policies to address it: requiring masks on public transit, restricting international travel, and asking people to avoid gathering in large groups. Unvaccinated adults strongly oppose all other policies and are much more likely than any other group to say that getting vaccinated should be a personal choice.
• But behavior, of course, does not necessarily follow one's attitudes. As we predicted recently, resistance to getting vaccinated does not seem to be holding up in the face of mandates. (See “Pandemic Pessimism Strikes Back.”) There's been relatively little pushback within big companies that are requiring vaccination.
• As of September 30, for example, 99% of United Airlines (UAL) 67,000 employees have been vaccinated or applied for a medical or religious exemption. The number of unvaccinated employees fell by almost half, from 593 to 320, in just two days after the airline announced that it would soon terminate employees who remained unvaccinated. Similarly, the share of vaccinated employees at Tyson Foods has risen from just under half to 91% since its mandate was announced in August.