From: januarybaybee@gmail.com   
      
   https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/27/world/global-coronavirus-atti   
   udes-pew-intl/index.html   
      
      
   US and UK are bottom of the pile in rankings of governments' handling of   
   coronavirus pandemic   
      
   (CNN) Americans rank dead last -- by a long way -- among citizens of more than   
   a dozen countries who were asked whether their nation is more united now than   
   it was before the coronavirus pandemic, according to a survey released   
   Thursday.   
   And they come in a statistical joint last place with the British on whether   
   their country has handled the pandemic well, the poll finds.   
      
   In the United States, fewer than two in 10 people (18%) said the country is   
   more united now.   
      
   That's a full 21 percentage points below the next lowest-ranking countries,   
   Germany and France, where just under four in 10 (39%) respondents expressed   
   that opinion. Denmark had the highest percentage saying their country was more   
   united now, with more    
   than seven in 10 (72%) giving that answer.   
      
   As with so many questions these hyper-partisan days, there's a gigantic gap   
   between Republican and Democratic views of whether the Trump administration   
   has handled the pandemic well.   
      
   Three quarters (76%) of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said   
   the government has done a good job. Only one quarter (25%) of Democrats and   
   Democratic-leaning independents agree.   
      
   https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/.e/interactive/html5-video-media/2020/08   
   27/pew_corona_survey_good_job_780px_2.png   
      
   The findings come from a Pew Research Center survey of 14 advanced economies   
   in North America, Europe and Asia. The Washington, DC-based think tank   
   interviewed 14,276 adults by telephone from June 10 to August 3.   
      
      
   Role of politics   
      
   A clear majority of people across the 14 countries said their own nation had   
   handled Covid-19 well: 73% agreed, while 27% disagreed.   
      
   But in the United Kingdom and the United States, the figures were much lower:   
   46% and 47% respectively. They're the only two countries where a minority of   
   people said the government had done well. In every other country polled, most   
   people said their    
   government had done well, from Japan with 55% up to Denmark with 95%.   
      
   The United States is not the only country where support for the government's   
   coronavirus response broke along partisan lines -- the Pew survey detected the   
   same pattern in the UK and in Spain.   
      
   Those results show it's not a matter of whether you're on the left or the   
   right of the political spectrum that predicts whether you think your   
   government has done well. The US and UK have right-leaning governments, while   
   Spain has a left-leaning one. In    
   each country, people with the same political bent as the government tend to   
   say it's done well in the crisis.   
      
   https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/.e/interactive/html5-video-media/2020/08   
   27/pew_corona_survey_division_780px.png   
      
   John Curtice, one of Britain's leading polling experts, said that phenomenon   
   is well understood by social scientists.   
      
   "Generally speaking, it doesn't matter what you're asking: the government in   
   power is more likely to be seen well by people who voted for it than people   
   who didn't," said Curtice, a professor at the University of Strathclyde in   
   Glasgow.   
   But he pointed out that the findings do make it possible to compare how well   
   each government is doing among its own supporters.   
      
   In Spain and the United States, about three-quarters of government supporters   
   say their country has handled the coronavirus well -- but in the UK, the   
   figure is just over half.   
      
   Pew Research Center research associate Kat Devlin pointed out that not all   
   countries polled had a political divide over views of the government response,   
   "especially in countries with high levels of overall satisfaction with how   
   their nation has dealt    
   with the COVID-19 outbreak."   
      
   "In Denmark, currently led by the center-left Social Democrats, and in   
   Australia, whose leader Scott Morrison belongs to the center-right Liberal   
   Party of Australia, at least nine-in-ten adults on both the political left and   
   political right believe their    
   country has done well against the coronavirus," Devlin, one of the report   
   authors, told CNN by email.   
      
   Economic confidence is also linked to the belief the government is doing well.   
   In all 14 countries in the survey, people who said the current economic   
   situation is good were more likely to say the government was doing a good job   
   on coronavirus.   
      
   Again, the US is the most extreme example of the trend: There's a 44-point gap   
   between those who say the current economic situation is bad but the government   
   is handling the crisis well (34%) and those who say the economic situation is   
   good and the    
   government is handling the crisis well (78%).   
      
   Life changes   
      
   One possibly surprising area where the United States falls smack in the middle   
   of the pack is on the question of whether more international cooperation would   
   have reduced the number of coronavirus cases in their country. Across the   
   whole 14-country    
   survey, 59% of people said it would, while 36% said it would not. In the   
   United States, 58% said more cooperation between countries would have helped   
   and 37% said it would not.   
      
   Among other findings in the survey, women in every country are more likely   
   than men to say their lives have changed because of the crisis, with a gap as   
   high as 15 points in the United States, France and Sweden.   
      
   And perhaps most surprising of all, in Sweden -- which famously put almost no   
   restrictions in place to stop the spread of the virus -- more than seven out   
   of 10 people (71%) said their lives had changed a great deal as a result of   
   the outbreak. That's    
   the second highest percentage of any country in the survey, behind South Korea   
   (81%), which put sweeping restrictions in place.   
      
   The Pew Research Center conducted nationally representative telephone surveys   
   of adults in the United States, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany,   
   Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK, Australia, Japan and South   
   Korea.   
      
   The study was conducted only in countries where nationally representative   
   telephone surveys are feasible.   
      
   "Due to the coronavirus outbreak, face-to-face interviewing is not currently   
   possible in many parts of the world that we have previously included in our   
   research," report co-author Devlin said. "We have surveyed in 12 of these   
   nations virtually every    
   year since 2016, and they represent some of the world's largest economies and   
   traditional allies of the US."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)