In America, even pandemics are political

Editor’s note: This article was updated on March 12th to include the president’s announcement of new measures to contain the pandemic

POLITICAL PARTISANSHIP has penetrated nearly every facet of American life. Today it influences not only Americans’ decisions at the ballot box, but also their views on race, immigration, the environment and helping the poor. Even scientific beliefs now fall along partisan lines. As Americans face the threat of a pandemic of covid-19, will their political beliefs affect how they respond?

A new poll conducted by YouGov, a pollster, on behalf of The Economist suggests that party loyalties do matter. In the survey, carried out between March 8th and 10th, 61% of Democrats said they were “very” or “somewhat” worried about personally contracting the coronavirus; only 37% of Republicans shared this fear. Indeed 24% of Republicans said they were “not worried at all” about catching the virus.

Democrats are taking more preventative measures, too. Some 23% of Democrats have cancelled travel plans, compared with just 14% of Republicans. The share of survey respondents who said they had worked from home was 19% and 9% for Democrats and Republicans, respectively. Moreover, 9% of Democrats have donned a medical face mask in public; only 5% of Republicans have done the same.

Opinions about how the government should respond to the crisis are even more sharply divided. About half of Democrats said people should be required to work from home; roughly a third said large public gatherings and long-distance travel should be cancelled; and one in five said schools and universities should be temporarily closed. Republicans were less supportive of every one of these measures. Only on the proposal to quarantine people returning from places hit by the virus were they as enthusiastic as their Democratic counterparts.

Why are liberals so fearful of covid-19, and conservatives so blasé? Past studies have found that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to trust scientists, who have sounded various alarms over the coronavirus. Meanwhile President Donald Trump and Fox News, the most polarising sources of information on the right, had until recently characterised the virus as no more serious than the common flu. That changed on March 11th when the president announced sweeping measures to deal with the pandemic, including suspending travel from much of Europe for 30 days. It will be interesting to see whether his fellow Republicans now have a similar change of heart.