Most adults doubt the number of coronavirus deaths that have been reported in the United States.
A poll from Axios and Ipsos found 67% of respondents do not believe the COVID-19 death toll, which as of Monday stood at around 69,000, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, including data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Forty-four percent of respondents believe the figure is too low; 23% believe fewer people had died than has been reported.
Sixty-three percent of Democratic respondents said the death toll was being underreported. Republicans were more likely to believe the opposite, as 40% said they believed the death toll was overreported. Republicans had the largest segment that trusted the U.S. death toll with 36% reporting that the death toll was “about right,” compared to 31% of independents and 29% of Democrats.
“How people are actually processing information and assigning credibility to it is 100% partisan,” said Cliff Young, president of Ipsos U.S. Public Affairs, in response to the partisan divide in the data.
The poll included responses from 1,012 adults in the U.S. and was conducted between Friday and Monday. The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the editor’s mistake in having the story state 44% of respondents believe the reported death toll in the U.S. is too high. The opposite was found in the survey.
