An overwhelming majority of Americans believe China is responsible for the breakout of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new poll.
A Harris Poll released on Wednesday indicates that 77 percent of respondents nationally blame the Chinese government for spreading the virus. The sentiment was echoed across the political aisle with 67 percent of registered Democrats, 75 percent of independents, and 90 percent of Republicans attributing the pandemic to China.
The poll also found that 72 percent of respondents believed China had “inaccurately” reported about the impact that the virus had on its population.
Given those results, it was not surprising that 69 percent favored President Donald Trump enacting tougher trade policies against the communist regime, while 71 percent said American companies should scale back manufacturing in China. Overall, 54 percent of Americans expressed that the Chinese government should be forced to pay some sort of reparations for the pandemic.
The poll, conducted between April 3 through April 5 by surveying 1,993 adults across the country, is one of the first to emerge since the Coronavirus brought the nation to a standstill. It poses good news for Trump, who has attempted publicly to hold the Chinese government accountable for downplaying the threat posed by the virus.
Chinese health administrators detected the first coronavirus case in the country’s Hubei province in November of 2019. Instead of reporting the virus then to the World Health Organization (WHO), Beijing waited until early December to make the outbreak known. Global health officials believe the delay in reporting allowed the virus to spread rapidly outside of Hubei and across the rest of the world.
Since then, U.S. intelligence has confirmed that Beijing has hid the severity of the outbreak, opting to jail whistleblowers and muzzle critics that attempted to warn about the pandemic.