How do people feel about ending the Covid-19 shutdown and going back to work?
As we approach the end of the first month of widespread shutdowns across the US, many states are considering lifting restrictions and allowing people to return to work. In addition, as summer approaches and the weather warms, people are ignoring local shelter-in-place rules to venture outdoors in large numbers. A number of states — Montana, Minnesota, Colorado, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina — have already begun to lift their shutdowns. These news reports and changes in government policy suggest there is a widespread popular sentiment that it must be safe to return to work.
A few days ago, we began asking the hundreds of thousands of How We Feel users across the country about whether they felt safe returning to work. Already we have received nearly 100,000 responses from people in all 50 states and Washington, DC, with some surprising results in light of the state policy changes and recent news coverage.
Across the US we found that the majority (60%) of respondents to our survey did not feel safe returning to work*. There was substantial geographic variation in how safe people felt returning to work. In the states with the most Covid-19 cases, such as New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, only about 30% of users reported feeling safe to return to work. The differences in people’s feeling of safety was partially explained by the population density of the state they lived in. People in less dense states reported feeling significantly more safe returning to work, whereas people in more densely populated states felt less safe.
The majority of HowWeFeel users would not feel safe returning to work, even in states that have already begun to lift restrictions. This finding agrees with a recent poll reporting that the majority of Americans believe social distancing should be kept in place “as long as is needed to curb the spread of the coronavirus.” Overall, despite the economic, social, and emotional strain caused by restrictive lockdowns, many Americans understandably remain wary about resuming normal activities, such as work, in this uncertain time. To continue fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, we need your help in donating data to How We Feel. Your data will help scientists and policy-makers understand where the disease is spreading, what drives that spread, as well as who it is affecting, in order to get us to the point where everyone can feel safe from Covid-19.
Many thanks to Christine Tedijanto and Ben Law for help writing this piece, and Andrew Tang for graphic design.
* Some caveats
This analysis includes responses from a large sample of nearly 100,000 HowWeFeel users from all over the country. Results may differ by occupation, risk factors (e.g. age), and other characteristics not shown here. In addition, our population is currently skewed towards white, female users and is not a representative sample of the United States. Many underlying factors may be driving the association between population density and not feeling safe to return to work, including, but not limited to, the expected magnitude of current or potential disease outbreaks, regional distributions in occupation, or political views. Some of these hypotheses may be explored in future analyses.
