Adults are more likely to opt for cloth masks than any other type of face covering in public, new Morning Consult polling shows, despite recent public health warnings that they’re less protective against the omicron variant.
What you need to know:
- Adults were split on how long they expect to be wearing a mask in public: About 1 in 5 said they plan to wear them in public for the foreseeable future, while 14 percent said they’re no longer wearing them regularly — or never did.
- Health officials recommend that people who are not up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines wear a mask when indoors in public. Yet only about 1 in 10 unvaccinated adults said they would continue to mask up as long as health officials recommend it. They were more likely to point to workplace or local mandates, though 15 percent also said they expect to keep wearing a mask indefinitely.
- Overall, about 3 in 5 adults said they are comfortable doing outdoor activities without a mask, while 35 percent said they’re comfortable being maskless indoors. Meanwhile, nearly 4 in 5 adults say they’re still wearing masks “sometimes” or “always” in indoor public spaces, while 56 percent say as much about being outdoors.
- Vaccinated adults were much more likely than their unvaccinated peers to say they typically wear a mask in public, and less likely to say they’d be comfortable going maskless at either indoor or outdoor settings. The CDC recommends that vaccinated people wear a mask indoors if the virus is spreading at a high level in their community.
The Jan. 22-23, 2022, poll was conducted among a representative sample of 2,211 U.S. adults, with an unweighted margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.