Poll: The very liberal and COVID

See it discussed here, the divide in how COVID is perceived by those who identify as liberal. The very liberal take it much more seriously and continue to advise and take precautions. "The merely liberal are sometimes closer to moderates than to the very liberal." The very liberal category are about 10% of the population and are mostly younger than 50 with a 4-year college degree. 

The poll calls them "outliers" regarding COVID. That is how they are also framed by moderate liberals (aka the establishment status quo) and Republicans, as 'extreme left.' Such categories using the left/right spatial orientation indeed makes it seem like progressives are extreme, and that the correct balance should be somewhere more toward the middle, like a teeter totter. 

However the correct way to frame progressives is more akin to developmental psychology's hierarchical scale, Maslow's hierarchy of needs being one of the first but still an accurate measure. Later measures include Piaget's model which was further developed by the model of hierarchical complexity and other models. These measures find progressives as the some of the most developed overall and therefore likely to be more accurate in their views on issues, COVID being one of them.

Instead of labeling them outliers they are more correctly framed as our societal vanguard. They have been the ones in legislatures who have implemented policies that have been generally described as societal progress. Hence we should look to their current policies as also the most beneficial for that further progress. 

Granted this is a broad generalization that requires specificity depending on the issue and the context. But overall it holds. Specifically related to precautions and COVID it certainly makes sense in terms of public health, as eliminating precautions at this stage of the pandemic will only lead to further spikes in illness, hospitalizations and deaths. By any measure, other than economic, this is going backward instead of forward. Even in the economic domain the short-term benefits of removing precautions will be outweighed by the long-term effects when those spikes hit again and the pandemic is prolonged.

It's similar to our views and policies on the climate crisis and the economy. We still tend to sacrifice the former in the name of the latter when in fact the latter only exacerbates the former. The IPCC reports make clear we need urgent and transformative change and quickly to avert long-term environmental disaster that requires an expedited shift away from fossil fuels to renewables. And yet we slow walk that transition to continually feed the greed of the oil barons who pay off our representatives for short-term gain at our long-term economic losses due to that crisis, let alone the costs to humanity.