March 20, 2024 - 6:40pm
Over half of Democrats do not believe the Covid-19 pandemic is over, new polling from Gallup has shown.
The poll found that only 41% of Democrats say the pandemic is over, versus 79% of Republicans and 63% of independent voters who think the same. At the same time, 57% of all US adults report that their lives have not returned to normal, and 43% expect they never will.
While those on the Left of the spectrum in particular have clung onto the belief that the pandemic is not over, the overall percentage of pandemic-fearing Americans actually rose to 47% last September before steadily falling to 41% today.
This attitude comes in spite of President Joe Biden telling CBS in September 2022 that the “pandemic is over”. He was met with immediate resistance from his own administration, as well as from the media and the public health establishment.
Press coverage has played a role in this partisan split over Covid, with Left-leaning mainstream outlets continuing to publish articles which raise fears over the persistent dangers of the disease. “Covid isn’t over, and we shouldn’t act like it is,” a letter run in the Washington Post declared just last month. “Covid is back, and the U.S. is unprepared for the next bug,” read a January headline from the same outlet’s editorial board. Also that month, the New Republic warned that “Democrats can’t keep ignoring Covid in 2024.”
The vast majority of Americans say they’ve already had Covid, and the share of Americans who are somewhat or very worried about the virus has fallen from a 2020 peak of 59% to 20% today.
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SubscribeSix in 10 Democrats don’t want the pandemic to be over.
They’re stubborn and have never been wrong about anything. So given their obvious stupidity over this issue you can safely assume whatever the issue they will be talking out of their @rses. As ever, too busy thinking well of themselves to deal with reality.
The trans issues are really going to cause them some serious cognitive dissonance now that people are starting to openly challenge it. It is hard to be sanctimonious when you know everything coming out of your mouth is completely batshit crazy.
Seems reasonable to me that people would say the pandemic is not over, because there are still so many cases (around me, at least) with quite a few on their second or third dose of it. When I go to the doctor or dentist, they are still masked up. It’s somewhere between being a pandemic and now being normal.
Rates of respiratory illness in every major country are comparable with 2019. The only thing that makes it ‘still a pandemic’ is people’s attitudes, which have changed.
Additionally, it is unclear whether chronic health effects of lockdown or perhaps even the vaxxines may be having other impacts that get shoehorned into the notion of ‘pandemic’.
Yes, it’s become just another mostly harmless virus endemic in society. This was always going to happen. It’s no big deal.
Do you know what pandemic means?
Six out of 10 Democrats are so stupid the still believe that Covid is real
Not sure about USA but in uk people paid by the state (obviously by productive sector of economy, really) want to go back to lazy life of getting paid for doing sweet fu*k all.
I had few encounters with NHS recently and the number of people just standing around doing nothing and being completely disinterested in their job and wellbeing of patients is staggering.
But the only cry of the left in uk is “give more money to NHS”.
You are pretty stupid yourself if you think.it isn’t! Not a good look for “anti woke” – uttering endless conspiracy theories and other nonsense (including CO2 is not a greenhouse gas, something science has understood for over 150 years!).
Covid is a real disease, quite possibly a bio engineered one. That doesn’t mean it’s the equivalent of the Great Plague.
I suspect, as evidenced by most people’s general behaviour, that they do know it’s over. What they are trying to do is signal they are among the good people, who would have kept complying forever, had it not been for those pesky people questioning the good and the righteous rendering such efforts pointless. Why, they just had to give up! Such a shame they had to return to their normal lives, but at least they can feel good about themselves, they were willing to do the right things.
Indeed. Matthew 6 verse 5. It is all about virtue signaling.
I agree with the virtue signaling some people persist in demonstrating. I was at a race track yesterday which was full of people, unmasked I might add. But for the one woman several rows in front of me who arrived with a mask on but would periodically take it off and put it back on. She left it off for most of the time. But she wanted us to know that she was prepared!
The mask became not only a political marker, but a social marker, announcing one’s membership of the virtuous elite in resistance to those they identified as the crass “uneducated.”
“Deplorables” in the words of one HRC.
Probably waiting for the Trump disinfectant injection…
97% of Climate Protesters agree.
At least you survived the vaccine, CS, so thats a plus, or else we would miss your scintillating wit.
Long ago in a galaxy far, far away there were people who generally trusted public health officials to act in the interest of the public. That changed in the 1980’s with the AIDs epidemic, when–because of the politics of the time–the victims could not be stigmatized and interventions could not ruffle the sensitivities of the reservoir population. Consequently, a viral disease with 100% mortality that was spreading relentlessly was exempted from all the standard epidemiological interventions. There was no talk of “super-spreader events” and the bars and bath houses that served as vectors were not shut down. The foundation of epidemiological response was merely the encouragement to safe sex and the distribution of condoms. So, why do people marvel that Covid epidemiological interventions were met with such distain? The genie was out of the bottle. If people with AIDs were exempt from public health priorities, why not everyone else?
“there were people who generally trusted public health officials”
I doubt it. Long ago in a galaxy far away, most people simply didn’t listen to any public health officials. They maybe listened to their family doctor and they trusted the wisdom of their grandmothers.
You need to review your history. In the era between the discovery of microbes as the vectors of communicable disease and the development of antibiotics there was a very high compliance with public health measures. In that time period thousands of people were confined in tuberculosis sanatoriums via the assessments of public health authorities who were rarely challenged. Others identified to have diseases like meningococcal meningitis, typhus, or cholera were strictly quarantined at home with notices attached to their doors forbidding entry or exit. People overwhelmingly complied. If you are unaware of this, it is only evidence of your lack of familiarity with the history of epidemiology.
It’s true I don’t know the history of epidemiology well. But I do know the history of history.
Until relatively recently, most people lived in rural areas, with minimal direct contact with central government. They worked every day, mostly locally, and any ‘compliance’ with public health measures probably simply overlapped with pragmatics and common sense.
Again, I could be wrong. But that’s what my nose tells me.
These people live in their own world but insist on running the one everyone else lives in.
Vote them out.
Yes!
The funniest line in the article is….”Left-leaning mainstream outlets..“.
Should read….”Administration mouthpieces“.
End times narratives run hot in Democrat circles.
It sounds like six in 10 Democrats need to get over themselves. They should cheer up though, as there will probably be another pandemic in 100 years’ time.
The pandemic is over. It doesn’t mean COVID doesn’t exist, but we are no longer in a pandemic stage.
Appears six in ten Democrats are just idiots.
You are so cruel.
They just have “long covid”.
Which means they are lazy bustards paid by the other taxpayers.
In a sense, the pandemic is not over. It is just that instead of the expected appearance of ever more contagious and dangerous variants, we got the very communicable but relatively benign Omicron variant. Is it possible that another more dangerous but still highly communicable variant will appear leading to renewed panic? Yes, but – as far as I can make out – it is not very likely.
I find it odd that in the various debates around Covid – its Wuhan origins, the effects of lockdowns, the reasonableness or otherwise of policy making in various countries, etc – there is so little focus on the fact that the Vaccines failed in their primary objective of creating an artificial herd immunity that would stop the spread of the disease and that we we were bailed out deus ex machine by the appearance of highly communicable but low lethality Omicron (which by providing widespread natural immunity instead achieved the desired end result by another route). Its appearance was so convenient yet so improbable that I am surprised there are no conspiracy theories surrounding its arrival.
The relationship I had with my doctor seems irredeemably destroyed; the medical profession seem unable to admit to doing anything wrong during the Covid Pandemic.
Press coverage has played a role in this partisan split over Covid, with Left-leaning mainstream outlets continuing to publish articles which raise fears over the persistent dangers of the disease. “Covid isn’t over, and we shouldn’t act like it is,” a letter run in the Washington Postdeclared just last month. “Covid is back, and the U.S. is unprepared for the next bug,” read a January headline from the same outlet’s editorial board. Also that month, the New Republic warned that “Democrats can’t keep ignoring Covid in 2024.”
.
The words “Democrats can’t keep ignoring Covid in 2024” are the best part of this article. Not “people”, not “Americans’, but “Democrats”!
The only thing a sane citizen can do, having delved into these words, is to spit to the side and step away. These people are incurable
Well, if we’re being technical, we have to specify what we mean by ‘pandemic’. The disease hasn’t gone away. COVID is still circulating and still quite common. What we should say is that the disease has become ‘endemic’, which is used to designate any disease that is circulating within a particular area or a particular population of animals. COVID 19 is now endemic to the human population almost everywhere. It circulates continuously at low levels comparable to other endemic diseases like influenza or the several other varieties of coronavirus which also cause respiratory symptoms. What we call the ‘common cold’ can be caused by hundreds of viruses, and many are coronaviruses quite similar to COVID 19. It’s possible that COVID-19 will, at some point in the future through viral evolution, reach a similar level of insignificance.
These are technical distinctions I expect are well beyond six in ten Democrats. They know people are still getting COVID and think, ‘oh well then the pandemic is still going on.’ I suspect it isn’t any more complicated than that. The President can say the pandemic is over and the media can say the pandemic is over but Democrats don’t actually trust the media much more than Republicans and some editorial writers and publications will ignore the technical details and opt for pure fearmongering just to get clicks and make money. The author gives several relevant examples of this nonsense, which is one of the reasons Americans don’t trust the media anymore.
I had to check the date at the top of this article. 2024? I’m happy report that in this particular corner of the Republic the pandemic has been over practically speaking for about 3 years and change.