COVID’s trauma continues
What is ‘normal’ now? The answer could profoundly affect the country’s politics.
WASHINGTON — Two years into a pandemic that has taken nearly a million lives in the U.S., COVID-19 has profoundly scarred Americans, damaging the nation’s mental and physical health as well as its economy.
That collective trauma has had a major, sometimes underestimated, effect on the country’s politics.
With the death rate from COVID-19 now having dropped to the lowest level since early August, before the wave of illness associated with the Delta variant, the pandemic no longer dominates political debate the way it did in 2020 and much of 2021. Inflation, crime and the war in Ukraine have displaced COVID on the list of top voter concerns.
But the pandemic continues to shadow the national mood. Its continued effect, along with inflation, provides a major reason that President Biden has not gotten much political mileage out of a rapid economic recovery that brought unemployment down to 3.6% in March.
Some of the best evidence on the continued social effects of COVID-19 comes from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has conducted surveys of the public throughout the pandemic.
Parents report widespread concerns, Kaiser’s latest survey found. Almost two-thirds of parents (63%) said the pandemic had hurt their children’s education. Over half (55%) said the pandemic had harmed their children’s mental health.
But children aren’t the only ones to have been hurt. Half the adults Kaiser surveyed said the pandemic has had a negative effect on their personal mental health, and 41% reported a negative effect on their physical health.
Although COVID has been most severe for older Americans, younger adults are more likely to report an impact on their mental health, with two-thirds of those 18 to 29 reporting a negative effect, compared with just over a third of people older than 50, the survey found. That may reflect another of the poll’s findings — young adults are significantly more likely than older ones to report that the pandemic has hurt their employment.
Among all adults, onequarter said the pandemic had harmed their employment situation. That hit 36% among those younger than 30.
Four in 10 adults said the pandemic has damaged their financial situation, ranging from 46% of those under age 30 down to 37% for those older than 65, according to the survey findings released Wednesday.
Those problems almost certainly account for part of the decline in Biden’s approval rating among the young — a serious problem for Democrats, who rely on big majorities of younger voters to offset the Republican advantage among those older than 65.
The fallout from the pandemic has been toughest on people with lower incomes, many of whom have jobs that don’t allow them to work from home and who live in crowded places that don’t give much opportunity for social distancing.
Nearly 4 in 10 adults with incomes below $40,000 a year (37%) said the pandemic had hurt their employment situation. That’s more than twice the share (15%) among those with annual incomes greater than $90,000 a year.
Those continuing effects are only part of the picture. The other part is that even as the rates of death and hospitalizations have sharply declined, most Americans have not yet felt comfortable returning to their pre-COVID normal.
A majority (59%) also say that people should continue to wear masks in indoor public spaces, to limit the spread of COVID and forestall another rise in cases. By contrast, 40% said that people should stop wearing masks in most public places so life can return to normal.
The public is evenly divided on mask mandates. Asked whether the government should extend the current masking requirement for airplanes, trains and other forms of public transit, which is set to expire on April 18, 48% said they favored an extension, 52% opposed one.
But asked about voluntary activities, a significant majority said they were still observing limits. Nearly 6 in 10 American adults say they are limiting their activities, with 42% saying they have returned to some, but not all, of their pre-COVID activities, and 17% saying they are doing “very few” of the activities they did before the pandemic.
Just more than a quarter of Americans (27%) say they have basically returned to normal, while 14% say they never significantly changed their activities.
As you would expect, those figures show a big variation by party: Among Republicans, a majority say they either never changed their activities (20%) or have returned to normal (35%), while 28% say they’re limiting their activities somewhat.
Among Democrats, 56% say they are limiting their activities somewhat, while 7% say they never changed their activities and 21% say they’ve basically returned to normal.
Black adults are especially likely to be restricting their activities, with 75% saying they were not yet back to normal, including 34% who said they have returned to very few of the activities they engaged in before COVID. The share engaging in very few activities falls to 19% among Latino adults and 14% among white adults, the survey found.
Most voters don’t judge presidents or political parties on specific policy achievements — very few of those sink into public consciousness. Instead, they judge based on how they feel about their lives — as in Ronald Reagan’s famous question in his 1980 debate with President Carter: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
In 2020, Biden defeated President Trump in part on the strength of his pledge to defeat the virus and return life to normal. But normality has proved elusive for most Americans. Until that changes, Biden will continue to pay a political price.