Novel Coronavirus, Old Partisanship: COVID-19 Attitudes and Behaviours in the United States and Canada

The novel coronavirus reached the United States and Canada almost at the same time The firstreported American case was January 20, 2020 and in Canada it was January 15, 2020 (Holshue etal 2020;Canada 2020) Yet, the response to this crisis has been different in the two countries Inthe US, President Donald Trump, prominent Republicans and conservative media initiallydismissed the dangers of COVID-19 (Stecula 2020) The pandemic became politicized from theearly days, and even though Trump and Republicans have walked back many of their initialclaims, there continue to be media reports of partisan differences in public opinion shaped bythat early response At the same time, the response in Canada has been mostly characterized byacross-the-board partisan consensus among political elites (Merkley et al 2020) Despite vastly different initial responses by political elites in the US and Canada, we knowrelatively little about how the publics in both countries compare In this paper, we examinenationally representative survey data from the US and Canada, fielded in late March and earlyApril, to examine American and Canadian attitudes in relation to topics including concern about