Americans significantly less worried about contracting COVID-19: Gallup

A new Gallup poll shows that concerns about the pandemic have fallen, with just over a third of respondents saying they are now worried about contracting COVID-19.

Americans questioned in the survey released Monday are more optimistic about the state of the pandemic than they have been since June, before the pandemic’s delta and omicron variants contributed to a significant uptick in infections, according to the survey giant.

For example, just 34 percent of people said they are worried about contracting COVID-19, compared to 50 percent in January.

Meanwhile, 63 percent of U.S. adults said the situation is getting better, 46 percent said it is getting worse and 25 percent said things are about the same.

In January, 58 percent of people said the pandemic was getting worse, 20 percent said it was getting better and 22 percent said it was the same.

The latest results, however, are still quite far from the 89 percent of people who said the pandemic was improving in June. 

Still, 55 percent of participants in the new poll said they remain concerned about future variants and two-thirds said they expect the pandemic to continue through the end of this year or beyond. Another half of respondents said that they have concerns over people who remained unvaccinated. 

The Gallup survey was conducted Feb. 15-23. It included 2,849 adults and had a margin of sampling error of 2 percentage points.

It comes as the world reached the grim milestone of 6 million total deaths throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.