Civiqs is a polling company that does relatively reliable online polling on a variety of topics. They combine large numbers of responses with rigorous sampling to produce surveys that have much smaller margins of error than most online polls.
Recently, they did a national poll on how concerned people are about a coronavirus outbreak in their area, with the polling lasting from February 25 to March 22. Here are the results, comparing the opening numbers with the latest:
| National – February 25 | National – March 22 | Level of Concern | Kentucky – February 25 | Kentucky – March 22 |
| 17% | 38% | Extremely concerned | 11% | 27% |
| 26% | 30% | Moderately concerned | 23% | 36% |
| 36% | 21% | A little concerned | 38% | 24% |
| 21% | 10% | Not concerned at all | 27% | 12% |
| <1% | <1% | Unsure | <1% | <1% |
Here’s the Kentucky data in an interactive graph. Use your mouse or finger to move the time line back and forth, and hover or tap a level of concern label to isolate that trendline.
Breaking it down by age and party
The growth in levels of concern is what you would expect, given the events of the past month. What’s really interesting, though, is what you learn when you look at the cross-tabs. If you click the link above, you can go to the results site at Civiqs and play with the filters and the graphs all you want, including looking at other factors such as state, education, gender, and so on. For this story, we’re going to focus on two filters in Kentucky’s data: age and political party.
In order to not drown in the data, we’re going to use one of Civiq’s analysis numbers: “net concern.” This is the difference between the Extremely Concerned and Moderately Concerned numbers, and the A Little Concerned and Not Concerned At All numbers. If a number is greater than zero, that indicates more people are concerned than not. A number less than zero means more people are unconcerned. In the Kentucky numbers up above, for example, we’ve flipped as a state from a Net Concern of -31 (11+23, minus 38+27) to a Net Concern of 27 (63-36).
So, what are the current Net Concern numbers for Kentucky by age and by party? Let’s take a look.
| Age Group | Republican | Independent | Democrat |
| 18-34 | -14 | 35 | 65 |
| 35-49 | 1 | 35 | 71 |
| 50-64 | 3 | 38 | 72 |
| 65+ | 5 | 33 | 77 |
Quick takeaways
- The group that is least concerned in our state about the coronavirus? Young Republicans.
- The group that is most concerned about the coronavirus? Older Democrats.
- A majority of Independents of all ages are concerned.
- Democrats overall are VERY concerned, even the youngest.
- And Republicans overall remain about evenly divided as to whether to be concerned or not.
It’s possible to see some reasons for the above results.
- Younger adults tend to not think it can happen to them.
- There is less worry about the pandemic in the rural areas, which tend to be Republican.
- Democrats, on the other hand, are the majorities in the cities, where concern is growing due to greater persons per square mile.
Even so, it may be that many Republicans and some Independents are “whistling past the graveyard” if they think it is not going to come to their area. And, since many of those same Republicans get their news from very different news sources than Independents and Democrats, it may be time for those news outlets to help their viewers and readers to understand that this is not just “fake news.”
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If you want to see how these numbers have changed over time, go to the results page and use the filters on the left to change the top slider graph.