LAWRENCE — A full two-thirds of Kansans say they don’t personally know someone who’s been infected with the coronavirus.
Yet an overwhelming number of respondents to a survey say the pandemic remade their lives, mostly for the worse.
They talk of worry, boredom. It has cost most of them money. In a time of one-way grocery aisles and when you need to wear a mask to go into a bank, they speak of a future that has hardly ever looked so gloomily foggy.
“It’s changed everyone’s lives,” said one respondent to a survey commissioned by public media project America Amplified for the Kansas News Service. “It’s been hard staying away from everyone I know and love.”
Still, that respondent reflected another common view of the poll — that the pain of stay-at-home orders felt worthwhile.
Kansans essentially said the damage to commerce and community makes sense as a way to keep a lethal virus from killing more people. They give state and local government higher marks than Washington, but that’s a common finding in polls.
If anything, most people said the federal response to a pandemic that’s killed 100,000-plus Americans came too late.
“Attacking the virus from the moment we were aware would have saved countless lives,” one respondent said. Another said officials should not have “play(ed) it off as a hoax.”
A sizable minority, nearly a fourth, said too much emphasis has been put on combating the virus. After all, unemployment claims in Kansas have never come so suddenly, or in such volume. (The survey was conducted from May 28 to June 4, before reports that the national jobless rate defied economists’ projections and improved, if not as much as initially thought, in May.) “I wanted” the state, said one respondent, “to let us get things open sooner.”
[The poll was commissioned by public media project America Amplified for the Kansas News Service. It was conducted by Hertz Research. The results are based on 616 responses to an online survey. While the demographics of the respondents generally reflect those of Kansas as a whole — by income, age, sex, geography, political affiliation and race — the results have been statistically weighted to match the state’s population even more accurately. The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 4%. See the results of all the questions and the pollster’s analysis embedded at the bottom of this article.]
Notably, white people appear far less worried about the pandemic. Only 32% of white respondents said they were very concerned, compared to 55% of people of color. Findings throughout the pandemic have noted that people of color — they generally have less access to health care and face other factors that put their health in jeopardy — have been far more likely to catch COVID-19 and to die from it.
Race matters
More than three-fourths of respondents of color said that the pandemic felt stressful or very stressful, compared to barely half of the white people in the survey.
People of color were significantly more likely to say they’ve lost a job, been furloughed, seen their work hours cut or lost health care benefits.
And while only about 21% of white people personally know someone who got the coronavirus, about 35% of people of color know someone who’s become sick from the virus.
