How Election Week 2022 Went Down

It’s been nearly three years since doctors in the city of Wuhan, China, first identified a group of patients whose strange pneumonia-like symptoms weren’t responding well to treatment. The SARS-CoV-2 virus quickly dominated the globe — medically, socially and politically. But this year marked a completely different kind of milestone in the pandemic: the point at which politicians stopped caring about COVID-19.

Hundreds of people are still dying daily from the virus, but you would hardly know that from following the priorities of candidates. In a study from the Brookings Institution that documented which topics all 2,360 candidates for House and Senate were talking about during the 2022 primary season, 76 percent of candidates said nothing about vaccine mandates. And of those who did mention the mandates, most (36 percent) were Republicans making statements against them.

But while politicians are clearly no longer thinking about the pandemic as a vote-getting issue, polling suggests that COVID-19 is still on the minds of Americans and continues to shape our lives, albeit in complex ways. In its Coronavirus Index poll from September 9-12, Axios/Ipsos found that 85 percent of Americans believe we won’t fully be rid of the virus in their lifetime, 57 percent remain at least somewhat concerned about the virus and 37 percent are still wearing a mask outside the home at least sometimes. At the same time, 46 percent report having returned to their pre-COVID-19 lives — the high since the poll began asking the question in January.

There’s a certain tinge of resignation to those numbers, and it’s hard to tell whether politicians aren’t mentioning COVID-19 because Americans no longer care about it, or whether Americans are just accepting that politicians have stopped treating this particular health issue as a public one. Pollsters, for their part, seem to be following the politicians. This September update marked the final regularly scheduled Coronavirus Index for Axios/Ipsos.