We’re still waiting to find out if President Joe Biden will allow the mask mandate for public travel to expire on April 18th or if he will extend it yet again. While he’s making his decision, he might want to take a peek at a new Axios/Ipsos poll that was just released this week. They asked Americans a variety of questions about how serious the threat from COVID was at this point and if the pandemic was still a major driving concern. While it may come as a great surprise to some people, particularly inside the White House and among cable news hosts, people really aren’t seeing this as a crisis requiring any extravagant government intervention at this point. In fact, it sounds like a large majority of Americans crossing party lines and every other demographic are done with the pandemic. (Daily Caller)

Just 9% of Americans believe COVID-19 is a serious crisis, signaling Americans are ready to move past the pandemic, according to a new Axios/Ipsos poll released Tuesday.

The poll asked Republicans and Democrats to characterize the state of the coronavirus in the U.S. Only 16% of Democrats called it a “serious crisis” compared to just 3% of Republicans. Sixty-six percent of Republicans called it a “problem, but manageable,” compared to 81% of Democrats. Overall, 73% of those polled said it was a “problem, but manageable.”

Meanwhile, 31% of Republicans said it was “not a problem at all” while just three percent of Democrats said the same, according to the poll.

So Democrats are still more worried about it than Republicans in general, possibly because theyconsume a lot more fear porn on the topic. But when only 9% of the public sees the pandemic as “a serious crisis,” the political class and the media either need to tone down their rhetoric or work on their messaging. Even among Democrats, the number was only 16%. It shouldn’t come as any sort of surprise that a large majority of Americans would refer to it as “a problem.” Of course it’s a problem. It’s a disease and some people will still die from it. You know… just like the flu. But those same people said that the problem is “manageable.”

It was a little surprising (and disappointing) to see that almost half still support mask requirements in school. That’s one area where the government narrative and messaging seem to have been particularly effective. But that figure is still well below where it was last fall.

Another interesting recent finding mentioned in the linked report is the reality that the states which took a more “eased” approach to masking and other mandates had better outcomes than those with the harshest restrictions in terms of deaths, hospitalizations, and all the rest. The lowest grades were given to blue states such as New York, New Jersey and California. Utah, Vermont and Nebraska fared the best.

This is simply one more collection of data to toss on the pile, and it should serve as a set of guidelines to all of the politicians fretting over the midterms. People are moving on with their lives and they are largely done with all of the government restrictions. The government helped to get new vaccines and other treatments developed at a record pace and made all of those resources available to those who wanted them. The job is pretty much finished and the medical community can take it from here. If you want to ensure that people don’t vote for you and throw your party out of power in November, all you need to do is prevent them from getting their lives back to normal. It’s really just as easy as that. And this is a sentiment that obviously crosses party and ideological lines far more than our betters in the mainstream media would have us believe.