The following article is cross-posted from a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research paper, the 11th in a weekly series that summarizes and analyzes what is known about global public opinion on COVID-19:

Today GQR continues its weekly series of papers that summarize and analyze all publicly available public opinion data on the pandemic, worldwide. This issue features an in-depth analysis of how publics worldwide are reacting as many countries begin to reopen their economies and societies after weeks of lockdown. The main takeaways from this week’s edition  include:

• Global publics feel cautious about re-opening. In most countries, people are more likely to feel their government is seeking to reopen the economy and society too quickly rather than too slowly. Strong fears of a second wave of COVID-19 later this year add to this sense of caution.
• In most countries, high shares now feel uncomfortable going to their workplaces, and outright majorities feel uncomfortable resuming most other major economic and social activities, apart from food shopping.
• Publics in most countries are particularly uncomfortable with the idea of sending children back to school.
• Countries that have built trust with their publics on battling the coronavirus tend to see greater public readiness to resume economic activity. This undercuts the idea of a strict tradeoff between health protection and economic revival, and suggests instead that countries where there is low trust in their leaders on battling COVID-19 – including the US – may also pay an extra economic penalty as their publics hesitate to return to workplaces, stores, schools, and entertainment venues.

With this edition of Pandemic PollWatch, GQR has now reviewed in all over 1,000 different opinion polls from 100 countries and territories. We invite readers to alert us to any relevant global polling data not captured here. Future installments in this series will go into more depth about other public opinion dynamics regarding the pandemic.

Read the full article HERE.