More than 7 in 10 Americans say they believe the coronavirus will impact their personal lives, a 26 percentage point jump from the beginning of March, a new Hill-HarrisX poll finds.
Seventy-two percent of registered voters said the pandemic will impact their lives while 28 percent said it will not.
By contrast in the February survey, just 34 percent of voters said they believed they would be personally impacted by COVID-19, and in the March 4-5, survey, 46 percent of voters believed the same.
While strong majorities of all demographics said they’d feel the affects of the disease, the poll found those ages 35 to 49 and Democratic voters were the most concerned groups.
Seventy-seven percent of 35 to 49 year olds said they believed the coronavirus would personally impact their lives compared to 68 percent of 18 to 34 years olds, 69 percent of 50 to 64 year olds, and 73 percent of voters age 65 and older.
Among partisans, Republican voters were the most skeptical of COVID-19’s personal impact at first.
In the February survey 30 percent said they believed they’d would be personally effected by the virus, compared to 38 percent of Democrats and 33 percent of independents.
That number climbed to 42 percent of Republican voters who said they would be effected by the coronavirus, while half of Democratic voters and 48 percent of independent voters said they same.
Now, in our latest survey on this issue, 76 percent of Democrats said they believed would feel the impact of the pandemic while 70 percent of Republican voters and 68 percent of independent voters feel the same.
“When I look at these poll numbers and I see that more than 7 in 10 Americans believe that coronavirus will impact their personal life, I think it really highlights just the exponential increase in concern the American public is feeling and has started to feel in recent days let alone weeks,” Mallory Newall, Director of Research at Ipsos Public Affairs, told The Hill.
According to data released by Johns Hopkins University, The United States now leads the world in coronavirus cases.
The Hill-HarrisX poll was conducted online among 2,001 registered voters between March 14-15. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.
—Gabriela Schulte
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