“Some Republicans are much less freaked out by the virus than they were a few months ago,” said Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina who is tracking Americans’ perspectives of the coronavirus through a panel survey. “But things are changing so quickly — these new outbreaks could scare them and maybe some of that polarization disappears.”
That doesn’t mean the politicization of the virus isn’t having an impact, though. Take the political fighting around whether people should be required to wear masks or the timeline around when businesses should reopen. The virus is spiking in Georgia, with thousands of new cases each day, but the state’s Republican governor is suing the Democratic mayor of Atlanta over the city’s decision to revert to its most restrictive opening phase and mandate the wearing of masks. “The national conversation about how we behave during this pandemic has been so colored by the partisan divide that it’s becoming impossible to talk rationally about the risks we are and are not willing to tolerate,” said Dr. Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist and the dean of the Boston University School of Public Health who studies the politics of public health. “If both sides were pushed out of their corners, they would both have to concede quite a bit, and we’d frankly all be safer.”