71 percent of Democrats think healthy Americans should still stay home: poll

Despite the rate of COVID-19 transmission falling rapidly and vaccination rates rising, a shocking 71 percent of registered Democrats still believe even healthy people need to stay home "as much as possible," according to a new Gallup poll.

In contrast, 87 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of independents said in the same poll on Friday that it was time for healthy people to go back to normal life.

In total, 56 percent say that it's better for people to live as normal lives as possible, while 44 percent claim it's still better to shelter in place as much as possible. The poll results represents the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic started that a majority has come out in favor of completely going back to normal.

While only nine percent of Americans polled said that their lives are "completely" back to normal, a further 57 percent said that their lives are "somewhat" back to normal, with the last 34 percent saying that their lives aren't back to normal at all.

These numbers are significantly improved from the last time this poll was conducted in October 2020, where only three percent of people said their lives were completely back to normal and 34 percent said they were somewhat back to normal. This left at the time 62 percent of people polled claiming that their lives were still drastically restricted.

Along party lines, Democrats are on average ten percentage points behind independents, and a full 20 percentage points behind their Republican counterparts in saying that their lives have somewhat or completely returned back to normal.