A little more than one-third of New Jerseyans say they are still wearing masks indoors, more than half the state say they are ready to get a Covid booster shot every six months, 56% of parents with vaccinate children under five upon availability, and 68% of people agree with Gov. Phil Murphy’s decision to lift a mandate for students and school staff, according to a Rutgers-Eagleton Poll released on Monday.
More than half of the state (54%) feel “very comfortable” returning to normal two years after the start of a global health pandemic, while 33% are “somewhat comfortable. Still, 11% of New Jerseyans are “not very” comfortable and 3% “not at all” ready to return to normalcy.
“The school mask mandate is one of the last visible public health emergency measures in the Garden State, and its end is a welcomed one for many New Jerseyans, according to our numbers,” said Ashley Koning, an assistant research professor and director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. “Parents especially agree with ending the mandate, as do partisans of all stripes, though to varying degrees. Nevertheless, disagreement is sizable and reflects the debate surrounding the issue of masking that often pits politics and public health against one another.”
Of the 68% that agree with Murphy’s decision, 46% strongly agree and 22% somewhat agree, but 12% somewhat disagree and 18% strongly disagree with the ending of mask mandates in schools.
“Over half of New Jerseyans think that the pandemic is not technically over, but they are mentally and emotionally ready for it to be,” Koning said. “Many New Jerseyans are reentering life and returning to normal despite knowing the pandemic will be around for a while.”
About half of the state (49%) think the Murphy administration was “just right” in the steps they took to deal with the pandemic, but 32% think he went too far and 17% believe the state government didn’t go far enough.
On the heels of Murphy’s final COVID briefing, just under half (49 percent) of New Jerseyans think the measures the New Jersey state government took to deal with the virus since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic were “just right” when they look back on the past two years. Thirty-two percent say the state went “too far,” and 17 percent say “not far enough.”
Going forward, 49% of the state think New Jerseyans should stay the course on mask mandates and vaccines, while 34% want the state to do less and 16% would prefer they do more.
“The pandemic has become yet another divisive issue that has political ramifications for local, state, and federal elections in the near future,” said Koning. “Views on how the state has handled the pandemic have grown more divided since the start of all this two years ago.”
The poll did not release party affiliations or demographics in their data.
Rutgers-Eagleton polled 1,044 adults from February 25 to March 4 with a margin of error of +/- 3.5%.
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