Politicians and officials leading the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic must present economic recovery and virus control as inextricably linked, after exit polls showed a divided nation views the issues as separate, public health researchers and economists say.
An overwhelming majority of voters who cast their ballot in favor of president-elect Joe Biden listed the Covid-19 pandemic as their top issue, while Trump voters were far more likely to be concerned about the economy, exit polls found.
“It is possible to stop Covid-19 and to rescue us from social and economic ruin, we just have to have the will to do it,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Medicine, whose work focuses on improving responses to epidemic diseases.
Throughout the pandemic, he said, “economists were saying the same thing as public health – that you have to stop the virus.”
The calls for renewed public outreach come as more than 237,000 Americans have died of the virus, more than 10 million have been infected, and the coming weeks are likely to bring the worst outbreaks of the entire pandemic.
Public health officials said they must emphasize both that Americans should wear masks, social distance, avoid high-risk situations, and that no one in public health wants another economic lockdown. Dually, they said, the emphasis must be that the economy will not recover if the virus continues to spread uncontrolled.
“The economy is really, really important to public health officials,” said Dr Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
“Everybody in public health is concerned about the economic devastation as a result of having a pandemic,” he added. “But it’s the pandemic that’s causing that, not the response to the pandemic.”
Economists are also concerned about a divided electorate that viewed the public health and economic issues as separate. Williams Spriggs, an economics professor at Howard University and chief economist for the AFL-CIO, said his field failed to recognize the task ahead of them when the pandemic hit.
“What we can see from the data – it’s the disease that has slowed down economic activity,” said Spriggs. “Whether they’re told to stay at home or not, [the virus] has made people uncomfortable gathering in public spaces, getting on airplanes, staying in hotels.”
Exit polls are often messy, and even in normal years provide only a rough sketch of how different demographic groups vote. Experts believe 2020 may paint an even less reliable picture, because so many people cast their vote through mail-in ballots.
Further, Trump broadly outperformed pollsters’ expectations, raising broader questions about the reliability of the polls. Nevertheless, if current figures hold after the research has been validated, there is a stark divide in the US on how to combat the pandemic effectively.
Thirty-five per cent of voters ranked the economy as their top concern, more than double the number who ranked the pandemic as the most important issue facing the country. Further, people who saw the economy as the top issue also overwhelmingly split for Trump, 82% versus 17% for Biden, according to exit polls conducted by the New York Times.
Those who ranked the pandemic as their top issue overwhelmingly split for Biden, at 82% versus 14%. Biden voters were also more likely to have actually experienced the economic and health impacts of the pandemic, where Trump voters were more likely to earn more than $100,000 a year and rank their family’s economic situation as “better today”.
“Particularly early on, when we shut things down, that’s a very bold action on the economy and I think that really struck people,” Plescia said. “But maybe they lost sight of the fact there’s a reason we’re doing this.”
Some of the nation’s leading public health experts have been critical of their own ability to deliver complex messages to the public following a calamitous lockdown last spring.
“I don’t think all of us in the public health community have done a good job of clear messaging,” Dr Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told NPR News. He added: “Control the virus and we can open up much more of the economy.”
Scientists and researchers are further hoping the end of a presidency known for fanning conspiracy theories, muzzling scientists and spreading misinformation will bring more Americans to a shared set of facts. In an analysis of news articles about the coronavirus, Trump fueled 38% of the misinformation claims, making him one of the largest sources in the world according to researchers at Cornell University.
One of Trump’s central lines of attack was that public health researchers and Biden wanted another lockdown, comparing health policies to a “prison state”. Similarly, Trump’s allies tend to position economic and social health as in opposition, rather than complementary.
Gonsalves described Trump’s strategy as “let the pandemic run its course and blame public health for the economic and social collapse [Trump] could have averted from the very beginning.”
Spriggs said some of the pandemic’s most consequential questions lay ahead for the Biden-Harris administration. “This disease has been so disruptive, and the real questions we haven’t been pushing is what happens after,” he said. “If we emerge and the only thing standing are Amazon and Walmart what does that mean?”
