A whopping 71 percent of Democrats in the United States want healthy people to stay home “as much as possible,” even as vaccinations soar and new coronavirus infections have plummeted, according to a new survey from Gallup.
In contrast, 87 percent of Republicans surveyed and 64 percent of independents said it was time for people to start living normally after more than a year of pandemic shutdowns and working from home.
The partisan divide continued for questions about how quickly respondents had jumped back into their normal routines.
As of May 2021, 57 percent of Democrats said their lives had fully or somewhat returned to how it had been before the pandemic. That number was 77 percent for Republicans and 68 percent for independents.
But in a bright spot, American optimism about the overall trajectory of the coronavirus situation in the United States reached a new high, with 84 percent of respondents saying things were getting better, while fears about contracting the virus reached a new low.
“Americans’ concern about the coronavirus has greatly diminished as the majority are now at least partially vaccinated, cases have been dropping, and state and local restrictions on public activity have been cut back significantly or removed completely,” Gallup said in an overall assessment of the data.