Concern about coronavirus is high in Florida as the state weighs whether to reopen some non-essential business, as neighbor to the north Georgia plans to do by the end of the week.
A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday found 72% of registered voters in Florida think the state should not loosen social distancing rules by the end of April. Another three-quarters think the state should reopen its economy only when it is deemed safe by public health officials, while 17% say Florida should reopen its economy even if public health officials warn against it.
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“The state’s stay-at-home order is scheduled to expire at the end of the month of April, but nearly three quarters of Floridians are not ready to drop their guard,” said Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy.
READ | Full results of Quinnipiac University poll
Half of registered voters in Florida approve of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ handling of the outbreak and 41% disapprove, with wide partisan gaps. Republicans approve 81-14%, Democrats disapprove 64-28%, and independents are split with 45% approving and 45% disapproving.
Another 6 in 10 voters think DeSantis should have responded to the crisis sooner. And voters disapprove 52-43% of his decision to exempt religious services from Florida’s stay-at-home order.
Florida voters also don’t expect the COVID-19 pandemic to end quickly:
- 49% expect the crisis to last a few months;
- 26% expect the crisis to last more than a year;
- 18% expect the crisis to last a few weeks.
The Quinnipiac poll was conducted April 16 through 20 among a random national sample of 1,385 registered voters in Florida reached on landlines or cell phones by a live interviewer. Results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.
Tourism industry affected
DeSantis argues opening up doesn’t necessarily mean things will go back to normal.
"So much attention is being paid to, ‘Oh well the governor of Colorado has announced this will open, the governor of Georgia this or that.’ Yeah, you can announce those things, but are people going to have confidence in coming out or not?” said DeSantis.
National surveys show Americans will still be hesitant to travel even six months out. In March, 87% of Americans had plans to travel within the next six months, now that number sits at 72%. More than half say if they do travel they aren’t getting on a plane.
Four out of 10 say the same about staying in a hotel.
The numbers paint a bleak picture for the recovery of Florida tourism.
“This is the largest crisis the global tourism industry has ever faced,” said Visit Florid CEO Dana Young.
Visit Florida, the state’s tourism marketing agency, calculates between March 1 and April 11, hotel revenues were down $1.6 billion in Florida compared to the same time last year.
Next month, scheduled domestic flight capacity is down 65% and international capacity nearly 80%.
However, the agency is seeing some positive signs.
Website traffic has recovered to where it was a month ago and the number of people accessing the site’s travel safety information page is significantly higher than previous disasters.
“This tells us that people want to know if it is safe to travel to Florida because the desire to visit our state still exists,” said Young.
The governor remains hopeful some of Florida’s unique natural tourist attractions will be able to operate easily within social distancing guidelines.
“Some of the stuff that we offer, you know our parks, you know beaches, all that stuff. I think people are going to view that as positive,” said DeSantis.
Projections for the opening of large tourist attractions like theme parks vary. Some analysts have suggested June opening dates, while others predict they’ll remain shuttered until the start of next year.
Few Americans support easing virus protections, national poll finds
Floridians aren’t alone in their concern over reopening the economy too quickly.
Americans remain overwhelmingly in favor of stay-at-home orders and other efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus, a new survey finds, even as small pockets of attention-grabbing protests demanding the lifting of such restrictions emerge nationwide.
The survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research also finds that a majority of Americans say it won’t be safe to lift social distancing guidelines anytime soon.
More than a month after schoolyards fell silent, restaurant tables and bar stools emptied, and waves from a safe distance replaced hugs and handshakes, the country largely believes restrictions on social interaction to curb the spread of the virus are appropriate.
Only 12% of Americans say the measures where they live go too far. About twice as many people, 26%, believe the limits don’t go far enough. The majority of Americans — 61% — feel the steps taken by government officials to prevent infections of COVID-19 in their area are about right.
About 8 in 10 Americans say they support measures that include requiring Americans to stay in their homes and limiting gatherings to 10 people or fewer — numbers that have largely held steady over the past few weeks.
“We haven’t begun to flatten the curve yet. We’re still ramping up in the number of cases and the number of deaths,” said Laura McCullough, 47, a college physics professor from Menomonie, Wisconsin. “We’re still learning about what it can do, and if we’re still learning about what it can do, this isn’t going to be the time to let people go out and get back to their life.”
While the poll reveals that the feelings behind the protests that materialized in the past week or so in battleground states such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are held by only a small fraction of Americans, it does find signs that Republicans are, like President Donald Trump, becoming more bullish on reopening aspects of public life.
Just 36% of Republicans now say they strongly favor requiring Americans to stay home during the outbreak, compared with 51% who said so in late March. While majorities of Democrats and Republicans think current restrictions where they live are about right, Republicans are roughly four times as likely as Democrats to think restrictions in place go too far — 22% to 5%.
More Democrats than Republicans, meanwhile, think restrictions don’t go far enough, 33% to 19%.
“They’ll be lifted, but there are still going to be sick people running around,” said 66-year-old Lynn Sanchez, a Democrat and retired convenience store manager from Jacksonville, Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott has reopened state parks and plans to announce further relaxations next week. “And we’re going to have another pandemic.”
More than 45,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19, while 22 million have applied for unemployment benefits since March. It’s that economic cost that has led some governors to follow Trump’s lead and start talking about allowing some shuttered businesses to reopen, including in Georgia.
Yet the survey finds that few Americans — 16% — think it’s very or extremely likely that their areas will be safe enough in a few weeks for the restrictions to be lifted. While 27% think it’s somewhat likely, a majority of Americans — 56% — say conditions are unlikely to be safe in a few weeks to start lifting the current restrictions.
“If we try too hard to restart the economy prematurely, there will be waves of reinfection,” said 70-year-old retired medical equipment salesman Goble Floyd, of Bonita Springs, Florida. “I don’t think the economy or life will get back to normal until there’s a vaccine. It just seems this is so seriously contagious.”
The emerging partisan differences are apparent. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is a Republican and unwavering Trump supporter. GOP lawmakers in Wisconsin filed suit Tuesday against the state’s Democratic governor after he ordered most nonessential businesses to remain closed until May 26.
The poll finds 59% of Republicans say it’s at least somewhat likely that their areas will be safe enough for reopening in just a few weeks, compared with 71% of Democrats who say it is unlikely. Still, even among Republicans, just 27% say that’s very likely.
“I haven’t met one person at the protests that disagrees with the fact that we need to self-quarantine until April 30,” said Matt Seely, a spokesman for the Michigan Conservative Coalition, which sponsored an automobile-based protest at the state’s capitol in Lansing last week. “Nobody wants to do the wrong thing. But the solution is not to stay in your home until the last case of COVID is gone.”
The AP-NORC poll of 1,057 adults was conducted April 16-20 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points. Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods and later were interviewed online or by phone.
Online: AP-NORC Center: http://www.apnorc.org/