The Canadian Perspectives survey has some interesting data about people's attitudes in Covid times. A quick look at the Series 3. It's been out for 2 months now, so a bit out of date, but I haven't seen much reporting other than the odd high-level stat. https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog/2020/08/25/covid-series-3-survey/

The part that triggered me to look into this survey are the questions around the contact tracing app. The likelihood people indicated with which they are willing to use a contact tracing app is quite low. Only 55% were at least somewhat likely to install it.

Part of the issue seems to be fundamental misunderstandings of what the app does or does not do. Even many of the people that are likely to use the app say they aren't comfortable with the "data sharing".

People who indicated they are unlikely to install the app give a range of reasons, some quite reasonable and straight forward like "not having a smartphone". But what's up with giving "not having a data plan" or "don't want government to have my location data" as reason?

The app does not need a data plan to work. Being occasionally connected to wifi is all it needs. And the app does not access location data, and certainly does not share it with the government. Public education on this app has been sub-optimal.

Also funny how some people say they won't install the app because they think not enough people will install it. That likely ties into misinformation that has been making the rounds in the media, falsely claiming that 60% adoption rate is required for app to be useful.

Another interesting question was on vaccines. It's been widely reported that most people said they'd likely get one if/when it's available.

Reasons not to get a vaccine, for those that said the were unlikely to get one, are interesting. Safety/side effects are the main reasons. But then there are also those that just don't think a vaccine is necessary.

Most interesting is those that said they think they already had Covid-19. Had not seen that asked on a national survey, when properly scaled that's 295,308 people, roughly 3 times the confirmed cases at time of survey. Not crazy when accounting for some mis-self-diagnoses.

A fun one is to look at the cross tab of attitudes toward vaccines and tracing app. Main purpose for both is to reduce the spread. Main difference vaccines also protect the vaccinated, app only protects users' contacts, not users themselves.

Generally people are more eager to protect themselves (vaccine) when available, than protecting their contacts using the app. Also, 9% of people said they were unlikely to both, use the app or get vaccinated.

I wonder what the attitudes to vaccines vs tracing apps in other countries look like. Naively I would expect the US version to be similar to Canada, except the “likelies” scaled down and “unlikelies” scaled up for both. But maybe not scale in same way? @RMCarpiano might know.