The Great Awakening

At the one year mark of COVID-19 in America, we wanted to share a special Harris Poll report, The Great Awakening: A Year in the Life in the Pandemic, which examines the most impactful changes to American society over the last 12 months based off 55 waves of weekly surveys since early March from The Harris Poll COVID-19 Tracker.

This report examines loss, resilience and emergence. The pandemic is remaking many aspects of American life that we are only now beginning to understand. From values and beliefs to routines and relationships, change is underway across the nation. A year’s worth of data on our society reveals new priorities in how we choose to live our lives, where we want to live and work and how we choose to spend our time and money.

Companies, in trying to recover, adapt and evolve must understand the evolution of Americans, who are digitally accelerated, hyper-resourceful and ever-mindful. There will be new winners and losers in a transformed marketplace. But one thing is clear: conventional wisdom and assumptions no longer hold in a post-COVID America.

About The Harris Poll COVID-19 Tracker

In early March 2020, as America was grasping the extent of the pandemic, The Harris Poll began the COVID-19 Tracker to continuously monitor public sentiment through weekly polling to understand how the virus was reshaping life across the nation. The weekly polling was conducted as a service to public health and the American public at-large, and soon became a critical resource for journalists, universities, healthcare institutions, and businesses. Today, The Harris Poll has stood up the single largest comprehensive data set on life amid the pandemic.