After the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its guidance last week to advise those vaccinated against the coronavirus to wear masks indoors in areas with high COVID-19 transmission, how many people are willing to follow the new guidelines?
A Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted July 31-Aug. 2 with a sample of 2,200 adults found that 38% of respondents said they’d “always” wear a mask in public indoor spaces after the new guidance, 20% said they’d wear it “most of the time,” 18% said “sometimes,” 11 said “rarely,” and 13% said they’d never wear a mask. The survey, released Wednesday, has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
The results were partisan. Fifty-one percent of Democrats said in the survey that they’d “always” wear a mask, while 3% said they’d never wear one. Meanwhile, 22% of Republicans said they’d “always” wear a mask, and 23% said they’d never wear one.
A majority of respondents supported local mask requirements, while 31% said masks shouldn’t be implemented by local officials. Supporters of a local mask mandate differed, however, on whether it would apply outdoors: 35% said people should be required to wear masks indoors but not outdoors, while 34% said masks should be required for both settings.
Ninety percent of Democrats supported local mask mandates in some capacity, while 48% of Republicans backed some type of mask mandate and 52% said they didn’t support a mask requirement.
The poll comes as COVID-19 cases continue to spike across the country, fueled by vaccine hesitancy and the delta variant, which was discovered in India and is now the dominant strain spreading in the U.S.
San Francisco and six other Bay Area counties reinstated a mask mandate Monday for everyone in indoor settings regardless of vaccination status, the Associated Press reported, following other localized mandates across the country in recent days.
President Joe Biden announced Thursday that federal workers would be required to show that they’re inoculated against the coronavirus or follow rules on masking, social distancing and weekly testing, according to the Associated Press.
COVID-19 cases across the U.S. have risen 139% in the past two weeks, and hospitalizations have increased 92% over that same period as of Aug. 4, according to The New York Times.
The U.S. has had more than 35 million coronavirus cases and 614,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University data as of Aug. 4.
