What Does The World Make Of America’s Response To Covid-19? [Infographic]

The Pew Research Center has released a new survey showing that America’s image has plummeted across the world in recent years, particularly since Donald Trump became president. The decline in U.S. standing has been especially notable among key allies and partners, with the downward trend in favorability accelerating over the past year amid Washington’s botched response to the coronavirus outbreak. In fact, the share of the public with a favorable view of the U.S. has now reached its lowest level in several countries since Pew started conducting this survey nearly 20 years ago. International views of America’s response to Covid-19 were a telling aspect of the research with overwhelming majorities in all countries polled rating the U.S. handling of the outbreak as bad.

According to the latest data from the Johns Hopkins University, 6.6 million Americans contracted Covid-19 by September 16, 2020 with just under 196,000 people dying from the disease so far. The Trump administration has been criticized for taking emergency measures such as lockdowns far too late while hospitals were plagued by a chronic lack of personal protective equipment throughout the early stages of the pandemic. Flawed CDC testing kits added to the chaos and the U.S. had a woefully slow start when it came to mass testing, exacerbating the crisis even further. In other countries such as South Korea and Germany, however, the response has been far more effective with a combination of early lockdowns and efficient testing along with isolation and tracing strategies keeping infections and deaths at far lower than levels seen in other industrialized nations.

Pew’s findings are damning with roughly eight-in-ten or more respondents in every country surveyed saying that the U.S. handled Covid-19 badly while half or more in 11 countries state that the U.S. handled the situation very badly. Spain had the highest share of the public agreeing that Washington had done a good job at 20% while South Korea’s share was the lowest at just 6%. The following infographic focuses on responses among eight of America’s key allies and partners with the share of the public rating the U.S. coronavirus as bad at or above 85% in South Korea, Australia and Germany.

*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)