Morning Consult released a tweet Wednesday of the poll that stated four out of five voters believe there will be a second wave of the novel coronavirus: “79% of voters said they think a second wave of coronavirus cases in the United States is likely in the next year.”
The poll surveyed 1,991 registered voters and was conducted between April 24 and 26, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percent.
The belief that a second wave is likely to occur next year was steady across the political spectrum: 78 percent of 670 Republicans surveyed in the poll stated that a second wave is either very likely or somewhat likely to occur. The same was true for 80 percent of the 794 Democrats surveyed and 77 percent of the 526 Independents who were surveyed.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that the U.S. could experience a difficult second wave at the end of this year, which he called “inevitable,” if states do not have provisions in place, according to a report Wednesday by CNN.
“If by that time we have put into place all of the countermeasures that you need to address this, we should do reasonably well. If we don’t do that successfully, we could be in for a bad fall and a bad winter,” Fauci said.
Fauci also said in an appearance on Fox News Tuesday it is “inevitable that we will have a return of the virus or maybe it never went away.”
Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Washington Post last week that the second wave of the novel coronavirus would likely be more deadly than the first because it would coincide with the regular flu season in the U.S.
“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through. When I’ve said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don’t understand what I mean. We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time,” Redfield said in the April 21 interview.
As of Wednesday, there were more than 1 million confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in the U.S. and 58,529 deaths attributed to the virus as of this publication, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. About 115,955 people have recovered from Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
Fifteen states across the country so far have begun to reopen businesses despite fears of a second wave, according to The Hill, following President Donald Trump’s unveiling of his plan to open up the American economy on April 16. Trump released the guidelines to aid the economic recovery by starting in regions least affected by the novel coronavirus.
“To preserve the health of our citizens we must also preserve the health and functioning of our economy. Over the long haul, you can’t do one without the other. A prolonged lockdown combined with a forced economic depression would inflict an immense and wide ranging toll on public health,” Trump said at the time.
The guidelines are a “three-phased approach based on the advice of public health experts,” according to the White House website, and allows for governors to open up businesses at their own discretion if their state meets the criteria outlined in the plan.
