Poll finds majority ready to accept COVID-19 as part of life

As the world enters the third year of COVID-19, 70 percent of Americans agree that “it’s time we accept that COVID is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives,” a new poll showed. 

The survey from Monmouth University released on Monday showed that while Americans are still concerned about the pandemic, the overwhelming majority think it is time to continue on with the virus being a part of normal life. 

The poll showed a definite partisan split, with 89 percent of Republicans saying it is time to move forward compared with 47 percent of Democrats. Seventy-one percent of independents say it is time to move forward, according to the survey. 

Twenty-three percent said they were very concerned about getting sick from one of the new COVID-19 variants, and 27 percent said they were somewhat concerned.

Twenty-eight percent of those surveyed said they thought a return to normalcy would never happen.

“Americans’ worries about Covid haven’t gone away. It seems more to be a realization that we are not going to get this virus under control in a way that we thought was possible just last year,” Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, said in a statement. 

Fifty-two percent of those polled said they “support instituting, or re-instituting, face mask and social distancing guidelines in their home state,” a decrease from the 55 percent who responded affirmatively last month.

Monmouth’s poll included 794 U.S. adults and was conducted between Jan. 20 and Jan. 24. The poll has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

Politicians from both parties have begun to call for the nation to learn to live with COVID-19.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) on Sunday said it was time to “learn how to live” with the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re not going to manage this to zero. We have to learn how to live with this,” Murphy said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” 

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) echoed a similar sentiment during his appearance on the same show. 

“I do believe that we need to move from a pandemic status and mode of operation to more endemic,” he said. “I think we need to move out of the panic mode. I think we need to handle this and make sure that we continue with our normal lives.”