Even as scientific knowledge of COVID-19 has increased, some progressives have continued to embrace policies and behaviors that aren’t supported by evidence, such as banning access to playgrounds, closing beaches, and refusing to reopen schools for in-person learning. But vigilance can have unintended consequences when it imposes on other people’s lives. Being extra careful about COVID-19 is (mostly) harmless when it’s limited to wiping down your groceries with Lysol wipes and wearing a mask in places where you’re unlikely to spread the coronavirus, such as on a hiking trail. And in their eagerness to protect themselves and others, they may be underestimating other costs. But some progressives have not updated their behavior based on the new information. Scientists know a lot more about how COVID-19 spreads-and how it doesn’t. The spring of 2021 is different from the spring of 2020, though. Geography and personality may have also contributed to progressives’ caution: Some of the most liberal parts of the country are places where the pandemic hit especially hard, and Hetherington found that the very liberal participants in his survey tended to be the most neurotic.
“We went the other way, in an extreme way, against Trump’s politicization,” Gandhi said. Gandhi describes herself as “left of left,” but has alienated some of her ideological peers because she has advocated for policies such as reopening schools and establishing a clear timeline for the end of mask mandates. “If he said, ‘Keep schools open,’ then, well, we’re going to do everything in our power to keep schools closed,” Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, told me. Some of this reaction was born of deeply felt frustration with how he handled the pandemic. But this is a different story, about progressives who stressed the scientific evidence, and then veered away from it.įor many progressives, extreme vigilance was in part about opposing Donald Trump.
Some conservatives refused to wear masks or stay home, because of skepticism about the severity of the disease or a refusal to give up their freedoms. People all over the country made enormous sacrifices-rescheduling weddings, missing funerals, canceling graduations, avoiding the family members they love-to protect others. Last year, when the pandemic was raging and scientists and public-health officials were still trying to understand how the virus spread, extreme care was warranted. And 43 percent of very liberal respondents believed that getting the coronavirus would have a “very bad” effect on their life, compared with a third of liberals and moderates.
This spring, after the vaccine rollout had started, a third of very liberal people were “very concerned” about becoming seriously ill from COVID-19, compared with a quarter of both liberals and moderates, according to a study conducted by the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington. People who describe themselves as “very liberal” are distinctly anxious. In surveys, Democrats express more worry about the pandemic than Republicans do. For this subset, diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity-even when that means overestimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit. L urking among the jubilant Americans venturing back out to bars and planning their summer-wedding travel is a different group: liberals who aren’t quite ready to let go of pandemic restrictions.
0 kommentar(er)
