A clear majority of people across the 14 countries said their own nation had handled Covid-19 well: 73% agreed, while 27% disagreed.But in the United Kingdom and the United States, the figures were much lower: 46% and 47% respectively.
They’re the only two countries where a minority of people said the government had done well. In every other country polled, most people said their government had done well, from Japan with 55% up to Denmark with 95%.The United States is not the only country where support for the government’s coronavirus response broke along partisan lines — the Pew survey detected the same pattern in the UK and in Spain.
Those results show it’s not a matter of whether you’re on the left or the right of the political spectrum that predicts whether you think your government has done well. The US and UK have right-leaning governments, while Spain has a left-leaning one. In each country, people with the same political bent as the government tend to say it’s done well in the crisis.
Maybe it’s because the governments in those three countries dropped the ball?
But this is interesting. The UK doesn’t feel more divided while a bunch of other countries do:
Notice the extreme outlier there. I wonder why?
One possibly surprising area where the United States falls smack in the middle of the pack is on the question of whether more international cooperation would have reduced the number of coronavirus cases in their country. Across the whole 14-country survey, 59% of people said it would, while 36% said it would not.
In the United States, 58% said more cooperation between countries would have helped and 37% said it would not.
Among other findings in the survey, women in every country are more likely than men to say their lives have changed because of the crisis, with a gap as high as 15 points in the United States, France and Sweden.
And perhaps most surprising of all, in Sweden — which famously put almost no restrictions in place to stop the spread of the virus — more than seven out of 10 people (71%) said their lives had changed a great deal as a result of the outbreak. That’s the second highest percentage of any country in the survey, behind South Korea (81%), which put sweeping restrictions in place.
I’m not sure what it all means but it clear that the US scores very poorly which is predictable. We had the worst response of all.