Boston Globe, December 2020
A new survey examining the public’s sentiment toward restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of COVID-19 suggests that a majority of Massachusetts residents favor such measures, even if it means being stuck at home.
The results suggest that there is not only political support for more restrictions to be implemented but also a public desire for more to be done, one of the researchers wrote in an e-mail.
“The biggest single conclusion is that there is a lot of public support for the governor to be more aggressive in his response to COVID-19,” said David Lazer, a Northeastern University professor and researcher with the COVID-19 Consortium for Understanding the Public’s Policy Preferences Across States, which sponsored the survey. The effort also included researchers from Harvard, Northwestern University, and Rutgers University.
Lazer said that with cases, deaths, and other key metrics on an upward trend recently, the public appears to be in line with public health experts’ view that “a lot more has to be done to ‘break the wave.’”
