UK: Public opinion on coronavirus – 7th April
Government approval returns to 61% after dropping last week
Reflecting a bad week of headlines for the government around testing, approval of teh Government’s handling of the Coronavirus outbreak dipped last week from 65% to 52%. However, this figure has recovered in our most recent poll to 61% with the net rating rising from +23% to +39%.
59% are confident in the Government’s ability to handle the crisis vs. 22% who are not. However, 57% still believe the Government acted too slowly in combatting the outbreak and 70% believe that levels of testing have been insufficient with 48% disapproving of the Government on this specific measure.
Obeying the rules
Behavioural science tells us that the belief that everyone else is following the rules is an important factor in determining whether an individual themself will follow those rules.
As the chart below shows, most people believe that most of the people they know are obeying the rules but fewer are confident that most people in the UK are obeying the rules.
Conspiracy theories
In any national crisis, conspiracy theories will find their outlet online. The most recent is the (completely false) theory that the outbreak of Coronavirus is linked to the rollout of 5G network infrastructure.
To place this in proper context, we compared likelihood to believe this theory with several other well-known and, for the avoidance of doubt, completely false theories. The full tables contain the expanded list of comparisons:
Full data tables are available here.