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Infographic – Worries Continue About Public Activities

Views on opening restrictions

(Pew Research Center)

9 May 2020. As Covid-19 cases and deaths continue to rise in the U.S., Americans by and large continue to support restrictions on public activity during the pandemic. Data from the Pew Research Center released this week report on these views, displayed in our weekend infographic.

By about a two-to-one margin, U.S. adults overall express concerns that restrictions on activities in their states may be lifted too quickly. In Pew’s latest survey taken 29 April to 5 May, two-thirds of respondents (68%) express greater concerns that public activities may be resumed too quickly, while about one-third (31%) believe activities are not resumed quickly enough. Those percentages are basically the same as a poll taken 7 to 12 April showing a 66 to 32 percent split.

The overall numbers, however, hide a sharp partisan divide. Among people who call themselves Democrats or leaning Democratic, nearly nine in 10 (87%) are worried about restrictions being lifted too quickly in late April and May, up from about eight in 10 (81%) in early April. Republicans and Republican-leaners, are about evenly divided in both surveys about lifting public activity restrictions too soon, or not quickly enough.

In a separate question on the 29 April to 5 May survey, about three-quarters of Americans (74%) say current restrictions on activities should stay about the same (48%) or support more restrictions (27%), compared to about a quarter (24%) who favor fewer restrictions. As with the question on concerns about lifting restrictions, a sharp partisan split is evident in these findings, with Democrats wanting more or the same restrictions, and Republicans more evenly divided.

The data come from Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel of 10,957 participants who complete online questionnaires.

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