Govts losing support for handling of virus

paris — Governments are fast losing support for their handling of the coronavirus outbreak from a public that widely believes death and infection figures to be higher than statistics show, a survey of six countries revealed on Saturday.

Support for the federal government of the US, the country with the most reported infections and deaths, dropped by four percentage points from mid-June, with 44 per cent of respondents declaring themselves dissatisfied, said a report by the Kekst CNC communications consulting group.

In Britain, just over a third of respondents approved of their government’s actions, a three-point decline in one month, according to the report, based on an opinion poll conducted over five days in mid-July. It also included France, Sweden, Japan and Germany.

“In most countries this month, support for national governments is falling,” the report said.

The notable exception was France, where approval rose by six percentage points, yielding a dissatisfaction rate of 41 per cent.

France, which has the world’s seventh-highest Covid-19 toll, has all but emerged from lockdown but has seen infections increase in recent days, prompting the government to order face masks in all enclosed public spaces.

In Sweden, which took a controversial soft approach to lockdown and has a higher toll than its neighbours, the prime minister’s approval rating has shrunk from a positive seven per cent to a neutral zero, the poll found.

People who participated in the survey — 1,000 per country polled

— generally believed the coronavirus to be more widespread, and more deadly, than official figures show. “Despite relatively low incidence rates compared to earlier in the pandemic in most countries (with the exception of the US), people overestimate the spread and fatality rate of the disease,” Kekst CNC said.

In Sweden and Britain, the public believed that six or seven per cent of people have died from the coronavirus, about 100 times the reported rate.

In the US, respondents estimated that almost a tenth of the population had died of the virus, more than 200 times the real toll, while Germans thought their tally was 300 times higher than what has been reported.

Such views, said the report, “will be impacting consumer behaviour and wider attitudes — business leaders and governments will need to be conscious of this as they move to restart economies and transition into living with coronavirus for the medium to longer term.”—