Five Year Reflections: What Americans Think About the COVID-19 Pandemic Response
This week the world passed a monumental milestone: the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recorded more than 777 million cases of the disease—including more than 11,600 cases in the last seven days—and more than 7 million deaths due to COVID-19 since 2020.
In October 2024, the Pew Research Center surveyed more than 9,500 U.S. adults about their reflections on the pandemic. It published the findings in late February, assessing that the pandemic arose during a time when the United States was already experiencing three major societal trends: a growing divide between partisans of the left and right, decreasing trust in many institutions, and a massive splintering of the information environment.
“COVID-19 did not cause any of this, but these forces fueled the country’s divide response,” Pew wrote in 5 Years Later: America Looks Back at the Impact of COVID-19. “Looking back, nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults (72 percent) say the pandemic did more to drive the country apart than to bring it together.”
Here are some other topline findings from the report.
Public Health Divisions
Five years after the pandemic declaration, U.S. adults are deeply divided on the response to COVID-19 based on their political alignment.
The survey found discrepancies in how individuals who identified as a member of the Republican or Democratic parties felt about the severity of COVID-19 as a contagious disease, measures to take personally take when feeling unwell, and views of vaccinations.
For instance, most Republicans (81 percent) said they did not plan to get an updated COVID-19 vaccine, while most Democrats (62 percent) said they planned to get the vaccine or had already received a shot.
“Health officials worry that currents of skepticism toward COVID-19 vaccines could cross over into views of other vaccines, like the one given to children for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR),” Pew said. “A March 2023 Center survey found large shares of U.S. adults continued to view the benefits of the MMR vaccine as outweighing the risks, but support for policies requiring vaccines for children to attend public schools had fallen 12 percentage points, a drop driven almost entirely by falling support among Republicans.”
This can be particularly problematic for mitigating measles outbreaks, since the disease is highly transmissible and requires coverage of at least 95 percent to maintain herd immunity (achieved through previous infection or vaccination). A current measles outbreak in the United States in West Texas, Texas, and New Mexico has grown to more than 250 cases and resulted in at least two deaths.
“Most of the cases in Texas are in school-age children between ages 5 and 17 who are either unvaccinated or have unknown vaccination status, and a few are among children who received a single dose of the MMR vaccine,” according to Dr. Bill Moss, a professor in epidemiology and executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center, in a podcast interview with Johns Hopkins University.
A Mixed Response
How did elected officials and public health workers meet the COVID-19 moment? The answer is mixed.
Overall, U.S. adults said state elected officials (49 percent), former U.S. President Joe Biden (40 percent), U.S. President Donald Trump (38 percent), and public health officials (56 percent) did an “excellent or good job responding to the pandemic.”
Americans were especially supportive of their local hospital networks; 78 percent of U.S. adults said the medical centers in their area responded well to the pandemic.
But, looking deeper at the survey results, partisan differences exist in the data. Just 35 percent of Republicans said that public health officials’ responses were excellent or good, compared to 79 percent of Democrats.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, most Democrats and Republicans agreed with newly implemented restrictions on public gatherings and nonessential businesses,” Pew wrote. “But these views changed quickly as the pandemic wore on, with continuing impacts on the economy, schools, and other aspects of daily life. Republicans, in particular, became increasingly critical of activity restrictions.”
For instance, 15 percent of Democrats said there should be fewer restrictions on public activity in their local area during the height of the pandemic, compared to 62 percent of Republicans who feel the same way.
“During the pandemic, Americans’ confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests fell: 87 percent expressed at least a fair amount of confidence in April 2020, but that number dropped to 73 percent in October 2023,” Pew explained. “This overall decline was driven by a sharp drop in the share of Republicans who express confidence in scientists to act in the public interest (from 85 percent to 61 percent).”
In a previous interview with Security Management, former Florida surgeon general Dr. Scott Rivkees spoke about how the politicization by government officials, influencers, and celebrities to COVID-19 limited the ability to keep the public safe.
Rivkees says this was the first time he’d seen a public health response become this politicized. Both former U.S. presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, for instance, oversaw epidemic response (for H1N1 and Ebola, respectively) and allowed public health officials to take the lead, following their guidance.
“Then during this pandemic, you had a coronavirus task force of experts in the field dealing with not exact information at the time, but they were the ones trying to give recommendations,” Rivkees says. “Because some of these recommendations didn’t jive with a certain political agenda—keep the economy open, keep schools open, false premises that it’s better to let COVID-19 spread through the younger population to get herd immunity—we ended up seeing real parallel messaging take place. The messaging ended up coming from elected officials, largely as the expert was being discredited.”
Five years ago today, the @WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic—forever changing the world. We spoke with security and health professionals to understand how the pandemic shaped them and what it means for the future of risk management. https://t.co/asaLcq9m2U
— Security Management (@SecMgmtMag) March 11, 2025
This now means that we are in a much worse position to deal with a pandemic because the public does not know who to listen to, Rivkees adds.
“The public no longer listens to the experts in the field,” he explains. “We’ve seen the rise of non-mainstream individuals who make recommendations that are not accurate but are followed, amplified by the megaphone of social media, which is how a lot of people now will get their information and make decisions.”
A Home Office Revolution
The unemployment rate in April 2020 hit 14.8 percent as more than 23 million Americans saw their work dry up—especially younger people, low-wage workers, Hispanic people, and women. Sixty-two percent of Americans said at the time that their jobs could not be done from home.
But for the rest of the American workforce, the pandemic ushered in the era of telework—55 percent of workers said they were working remotely from home in October 2020, up from just 14 percent before the pandemic.
Rachelle Loyear, vice president of integrated security solutions, Allied Universal, was working remotely before the pandemic began and continued to do so from her home office in New York City.
But she explains that the company itself went through a major digital transformation to keep employees safe—the top priority—while continuing to meet its business commitments to protect assets.
“A lot of buildings were shutting down, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t need to be kept secure,” Loyear says, adding that empty buildings are sometimes an even more lucrative target for opportunistic crime.
This meant that employees on the guard force line of the business continued to report to their contracted sites. But to facilitate this activity while mitigating COVID-19, Allied created a system for these employees to report in through an application if they felt sick or if they could not work a shift. Loyear refers to this as Allied’s employee engagement tool—LISA—that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to talk with the employee, suggest replacements for that person’s shift, and provide that suggested replacement’s phone number.
This helped the employee receive support from Allied staff, while also setting in motion the steps needed to ensure that someone else was able to report to the site in the original employee’s absence. Five years later, Loyear adds that LISA is now fully automated and empowered to make a call to the replacement suggestion to fill a shift that an employee reports they cannot make.
The pandemic experience “really taught us—even more than we already knew—about the use of technology to streamline things and make the job of the human being doing it better,” Loyear says. “We have a lot of places where we’re using technology and our AI platform, LISA, because we’ve seen during COVID that technology can make jobs better.”
Today, the telework transformation continues with 32 percent of U.S. workers reporting they are working remote all the time, while 43 percent saying they have a hybrid schedule.
There are pros to this flexibility. Employees who telework report that the arrangement allows them to balance their work and personal life (73 percent) and that they are more productive at work (60 percent).
But there are also cons. Employees who telework say it is difficult to feel connected to their coworkers (49 percent) and there are fewer opportunities for mentorship (34 percent).
Employers, however, are pushing for workers to come back to the office. Seventy-five percent of survey respondents said their employer now requires them to work in the office, workplace, or job cite a set number of days each week or month.
Yet workers who must report to the office some of the time also expressed confidence in their employers’ abilities to handle a future pandemic.
“Among those who don’t work from all the time, 61 percent think their employer would handle safety measures at their workplace about right,” Pew found. “Roughly one-in-five (19 percent) say they worry their employer would not put enough safety measures in place, and the same share say they’d be concerned that their employer would put too many measures in place.”
The Next Pandemic
Perhaps surprisingly, Americans across the board expressed confidence in the ability to respond to a future health emergency. Forty percent said the United States would do better than it did during the COVID-19 pandemic, 16 percent said it would do worse, and 43 percent said the country would handle a future health emergency about the same as it did COVID-19.
“About six-in-ten (61 percent) think the public health system would do at least a somewhat good job dealing with a future health emergency; an even larger share (69 percent) think people in their own community would do a good job,” Pew said.
There were discrepancies, however, in how Americans who identified with a political party felt that the public health system would handle a future emergency. Most Democrats (73 percent) said it would do a good job, while Republicans were split (50 percent said it would do a good job, and 50 percent said it would do a bad job).
“But when asked to think about people in their local community, Democrats and Republicans both have a positive outlook,” Pew said. “Majorities of Democrats (72 percent) and Republicans (68 percent) say they would do a very or somewhat good job.”
However, this survey was conducted before President Trump’s second term began and his administration began making major changes to public health infrastructure in the country and the world. This includes initiating a withdrawal from the WHO, cutting funding and implementation of public health programs through the U.S. Agency for International Development, and curtailing the powers of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The likelihood is that without the United States indelibly involved in preparing for, and responding to, these outbreaks all around the world, this withdrawal will come back and haunt us,” says Craig Spencer, MD, MPH, associate professor of the practice of health services, policy, and practice, at Brown University School of Public Health, in an earlier interview with Security Management. “I don’t know if it’s going to be this outbreak, an outbreak a year from now, an outbreak a couple of years from now, but we will regret it. We will absolutely regret it.”
Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, public health is facing a mounting crisis that could pose significant ramifications for national security. https://t.co/JZYovU8zse
— Security Management (@SecMgmtMag) March 12, 2025
Other Findings of Note…
Technology. While physical world outings were limited during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the online world was abuzz. People were meeting on Zoom, creating virtual game nights, sharing memes, watching The Last Dance and Tiger King, and using the Internet to conduct life maintenance—doctor’s appointments, food deliveries, and more.
During the pandemic, 90 percent of Americans said that the Internet was important to their life; 58 percent said it was essential, Pew found.
Technology access and usability was not equal, however. The survey identified that 24 percent of older Americans, those 75 and up, said they had little to no confidence in their digital skills; 66 percent of those same Americans said they also need help to set up and use new digital devices.
Um, rude. The strife of the pandemic may have taken a toll on our public behavior skills. Nearly half of Americans—47 percent—say people in public are ruder than they were before 2020.
“A sizable share of Americans also say they regularly see rude behavior in their daily lives,” according to Pew. “About a third of adults (34 percent) say they almost always or often see people behaving rudely when they go out in public these days, while another 46 percent see this sometimes.”
What exactly is rude behavior? These eight made the cut: smoking around other people, taking a photo or video of someone without permission, bringing a child into a place typically for adults, visibly displaying swear words, cursing out loud, playing music out loud, wearing headphones or earbuds while talking to someone in person, and bringing a pet into an indoor space.
Driving dangerously. Americans also expressed concerns about driving in their local communities, with 49 percent saying people in their community are driving less safely than they were five years ago.
U.S. adults who live in suburban areas were more likely to say people are driving less safely in their community (51 percent), which also mirrored the response from Americans who drive at least once per week. This dangerous activity included drivers operating vehicles while using a cellphone, speeding and aggressive driving, and driving in a way that puts cyclists or pedestrians at risk.
“Experts have linked the pandemic-era increase in vehicle fatalities to factors such as speeding, lax seatbelt use, and alcohol- or drug-impaired driving,” Pew said.
For more on COVID-19 and lessons learned from the pandemic, read our Pandemic Readiness and Biosecurity series.
