34% of voters say it will be at least 6 months before they feel safe without a mask

Concern over COVID-19 is growing, and people are feeling less safe than they did a few months ago.

Full Transcript:

Scott Rasmussen  0:08  

Good morning, happy Monday, Scott Rasmussen here. Welcome to my podcast: Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day. In these strange times of the pandemic. Americans want to make wise decisions, they want to stay safe, they want to live their life. And sometimes in the median dialogue, this gets down to a choice of, you know, do you listen to experts and stay safe? Or do you go and go outside and do other things and not be safe? And in reality, it's that's not the question at all. The reality is which experts do you trust and for that, the answers aren't quite as clear cut as the media narrative might suggest. To get to that point. I'm gonna start with a simple measure of where we are today. And that brings us to the number of the day. 

34% of voters, so, one out of three, 34% of voters say that it's going to be six months or maybe even longer, before they feel safe going out in public without a mask. Now, what's stunning about that number is not the fact of 34% believe it, but the fact that it's up nine points from a few months ago. You know, concern is rolling, people are feeling less safe than they did a few months ago. In fact, in May, when when I surveyed and did some asking about this question, the majority of people said they'd be saved by now. Simply not happening. Now, 48% of Democrats say it will take at least six months before they feel comfortable going out in public without a mask. That's up 12 points from a couple of months ago. And among independence, the number 30%, and that's up 10 points since May. Among Republicans not, you know, not surprisingly we see this in all sorts of news stories. They are less likely to be worried about this, only 19% of Republicans say it'll take six months before they're comfortable going out in public without a mask. But even that is up four points from a couple of months ago. So, this suggests that as we've learned more about the pandemic, as we've learned more about what's going on, as we've seen the experiences around us, people have gotten more nervous and more concerned, rather than more confident. And that's a pretty significant finding. 

And it's validated by all sorts of other polling data. I mean, people are feeling worse about the economy, they're more likely today to say the worst is yet to come. You know, you really get the sense that people are starting to realize, 'oh, this is not just a short term issue. It's a longer term phenomenon.' And a lot of times, we're starting to hear arguments, say, 'well, you know, you need to rely on science. You need to look at the numbers,' and both sides are wielding numbers. You know, you've got one side saying, 'oh my gosh, the number of infections are way up,' and the other side saying 'the fatalities are down. And oh, by the way, it's only among older people, and it's really significant.' So, how do we decide? Well, that's something I'm going to take a look at in the B-block and actually look at it from a historical perspective to suggest, again, the question is not do we rely on experts, but which ones do we rely on? And the answer may be some people that we've never heard of at this point in time. I'll be back with that in just a moment. For now, I hope you'll share this podcast with your friends and take a moment to subscribe to Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day.

Welcome back to Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day. I'm Scott. The number today is 34. 34% of voters nationwide say that it's going to be at least six months before they feel comfortable about going out in public without wearing a mask. And that's up nine points from three months ago. And by the way, you know, it's essentially the same as the number of people who right now are saying, 'Yeah, I'm okay with it.' So, we have this concern, but we also have some pretty significant divides, differences of opinion. 34% say it's going to take six months or longer before they're ready to go out in public. 37% say 'Nah, you know, I'm pretty much there. I am there.' 

So, I confess I'm a little bit of a sci-fi fan. And the other night I was watching a show that featured time travel. Usually I get a little tired of time travel episodes, but this turned out to be a pretty good episode and naturally, one of the times they went back to in American history was the Great Depression because that's just one of those times that we have a hard time grasping. And as I was watching it, I said to my wife that you know, for our grandchildren, when they see time travel episodes, they're going to come back to this pandemic era. They're going to come back to the time when everybody was wearing masks, and we didn't know what was happening. And we were wrestling with questions that that don't make any sense 50 years from now. And I tried to think, what will it look like? What will they laugh at, in the way we responded? You know, a lot of people today look back at the Depression and talk about, you know, some of the foolish choices that Herbert Hoover made that caused the election of Franklin Roosevelt. And by the way, it's also possible to look back at mistakes made during the Roosevelt-era because you know, we know a lot more we know the end of the story now. 

So, what will happen when we look back on the pandemic-era, or when our grandchildren look back on it. To get a thought of that, I want to take a, go back a little bit further in history and the story begins on July 2, 1881. James Garfield had been President of the United States for a few months and he was going to Union Station in Washington, DC. He was going to take the train up for a summer break at the Jersey Shore and instead he was shot. And it took several months, but he eventually lingered and died. The story, as we now understand it, turned out to be much different than they understood at the time. When Garfield was was shot, there were all kinds of civil war veterans around who had similar wounds, and they live the rest of their life with a bullet in their body and, you know, I won't say they didn't suffer for it, but, but they survived. Well, the unfortunate thing for Garfield was that he had the world's best doctors, the nation's best doctors, treating him and they didn't want him treated like a normal civil war veteran.  Instead, what they did is, you know, they brought these doctors in they even brought in some other experts and inventors and tried different things. And the objective was to get the bullet out. That's really all that they were focused on, we need to get the bullet out of the president so that he can survive. Now looking back from our perspective, we know that around the same time, there were great advances in medicine being made. Louis Pastore had shown the role of germs in causing disease. Joseph Lister had begun promoting this idea of the value of antiseptics and cleanliness. But the President's doctors just kind of dismissed all that as sort of a new quack science. They didn't even worry about washing their hands before fishing their fingers inside the President's body trying to figure out where that bullet was, and what was going on. And they really had a hard time finding it. So you can just imagine these doctors with unsanitized hands reaching around inside the President's body, looking for a bullet. Didn't have a very good effect. In fact, that is what killed president Garfield. It wasn't the bullet. I mean, that started the process. Obviously getting shot is never a good thing. But it was the medical care he received. And it was medical care from the best doctors we had available at the time. And the problem wasn't that they were foolish men. And look, nobody who's making different arguments today about how we should handle the pandemic, I believe they are all intelligent people making the best decisions they can, but it's hard to know who's right. Why? Because we've never encountered this before. And someday when our grandchildren are watching a time travel episode and they zip back to the pandemic era, they're just going to roll their eyes at some of the discussions that we're having. 

And unlike going back to the Depression or to the time of 1881, when Garfield was shot, our grandchildren will actually have video evidence of all the things that we said. They'll just be laughing at people. Now, I don't know which group of experts they're going to laugh at. But I suspect there are some people out there who will be famous to our grandchildren, who are the ones who figured something out, to help us move beyond this pandemic, to help us figure out how to deal with the coronavirus. And the challenge that we face today is not clear who that might be. Now, in the C-block, I'm going to have some closing thoughts on this. But again, I want to be clear, I'm not saying we shouldn't listen to experts. I think we should. I think we should listen to all of them and do so with the recognition that probably none of them have a full understanding of what's going on. 

Welcome back to Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day. I'm Scott and today's number is 34. 34% of voters nationwide believe that they won't be comfortable going out in public without wearing a mask for at least six months. More Republican, I mean-- Democrats than Republicans have this cautious view or fearful view, depending on how you see it. The number of people who are worried about going out in public without a mask is up nine points from a couple of months ago. A very serious issue and most of those who are telling you that they won't go out in public without a mask would say it's because I'm listening to scientists, because I'm looking at the data. Dr. Fauci is right. And by the way, most of those who say they won't wear a mask, they're also going to tell you they're listening to science, because they'll cite some other statistics. And the challenge we face here is, who do you believe? And I think the real answer for people at any time in any land is, you know, how do you how do you sort all this out? How do you recognize that these are very smart people, people we can learn from. They're looking at the data from their perspective, they're implying their own values to it about what they think is most important and what the risks are. But they're reaching wildly different conclusions. This is why it's so important that individuals have the right to make some choices on their own, that we let people sort these things out because if we only allow one set of voices to be heard, we're probably going to miss the person who got it right. I'm Scott Rasmussen, look forward to chatting with you again tomorrow. Until then, have a great day.