Below is a monthly update, marking key metrics and commentary in from mid-August to mid-September, the sixth month since lockdowns began.
Polling Round Up
The gap in Trump approval-disapproval on COVID response shortened for the first time since April, from being -17.9 points underwater to 16.2 points. The same 39% approve, but his disapproval dropped to 56%.
According to a CBS News poll, 57% of Republicans and 10% of Democrats view the number of COVID deaths as acceptable.
There were no Pew or Gallup polls for Mid-September.
Political Weirding
In mid August, according to multiple news orgs this week: ‘The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was instructed by higher-ups in the Trump administration to modify its coronavirus testing guidelines this week to exclude people who do not have symptoms of Covid-19 — even if they have been recently exposed to the virus, according to two federal health officials.
We would learn in mid-September via the New York Times that the new testing recommendations placed on the CDC website in August were not written by CDC scientists and in fact were opposed internally.
Two American drug companies have a vaccine in third stage trials. The CDC released a memo that suggested it could be ready for use in humans by October, prompting some to worry it is being rushed to aid Trump’s reelection chances.
In early September, The New York Times published a story about how college campuses are becoming hotspots.
Then in the Week of September 12, CDC Director Redfield told the Senate: “If you are asking me when is it going to be generally available to the American public so we can begin to take advantage of vaccine to get back to our regular life, I think we are probably looking at third — late second quarter, third quarter 2021.”
He also called masks “the most important, powerful public health tool we have” in fighting the pandemic, adding that universal use of face coverings could bring the pandemic under control in months. “I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against Covid than when I take a Covid vaccine.”
In a press conference later that same day, Trump said Redfield’s information was incorrect.
Ed Yong published a clarifying piece in the Atlantic describing why Americans are stuck and unable to fight COVID effectively. He lists nine psychological factors:
- the public to view solutions in isolation, which means imperfections become conflated with uselessness.
- Stay at home orders “were also meant to buy time for the nation to ramp up its public-health defenses. Instead, the White House treated months of physical distancing as a pandemic-ending strategy in itself….Showiness is often mistaken for effectiveness. “
- Fixing systemic problems is more difficult than spewing moralism, and Americans gravitated toward the latter. … attributes this tendency to America’s puritanical roots, which conflate pleasure with irresponsibility, and which prize shame over support. “
- magical thinking, in which some factor naturally defuses the pandemic, has become a convenient excuse for inaction.
- Even when the virus began spreading within the U.S., places that weren’t initially pummeled seemed to forget that viruses spread.
- exponential growth is counterintuitive, so “we don’t understand that things look fine until right before they’re very not fine,”… the coronavirus spreads quickly but is slow to reveal itself: It can take a month for infections to lead to symptoms, for symptoms to warrant tests and hospitalizations, and for enough sick people to produce a noticeable spike.
- Trump embodied and amplified America’s intuition death spiral. Instead of rolling out a detailed, coordinated plan to control the pandemic, he ricocheted from one overhyped cure-all to another, while relying on theatrics such as travel bans. He ignored inequities and systemic failures in favor of blaming China, the WHO, governors, Anthony Fauci, and Barack Obama. He widened the false dichotomy between lockdowns and reopening by regularly tweeting in favor of the latter. He and his allies appealed to magical thinking and steered the U.S. straight into the normality trap by frequently lying that the virus would go away, that the pandemic was ending, that new waves weren’t happening, and that rising case numbers were solely due to increased testing. They have started talking about COVID-19 in the past tense as cases surge in the Midwest.