Gov. Charlie Baker's slipping job approval rating can be attributed to Massachusetts residents' pandemic fatigue, the governor told GBH News in an exclusive interview Monday.
"I think everybody's anxious for the pandemic to be over. I am. I don't know why everybody else wouldn't be either," Baker replied when asked about his reaction to a UMass Amherst poll that found the high support he's enjoyed since he was elected six years ago beginning to slip.
Baker said voters want to see the state's vaccination plan ramp up and life return to something like a pre-pandemic normal.
"In some respects, the anxiety that comes with having been in this for almost a year and to see the vaccine piece sort of out there is a challenge for everybody who's in public life," Baker said.
In the wide-ranging interview, Baker defended his latest effort to reopen businesses and relax capacity regulations on indoor and outdoor gatherings at event venues. As the number of new COVID-19 cases in Massachusetts remains steady, Baker said hospitalisation rates are still significantly lower than what the medical community faced at the height of the pandemic's surges.
With nearly 3 million vaccine doses delivered to residents, Baker said the state is in a "a very different place" as the population of those carrying the virus has shifted from vulnerable older people to younger, healthier residents.
"We're to the point now where we have almost 10 times as many covid cases under the age of 30 as we have over the age of 70, and that's a completely different dynamic than the one we had throughout most of this pandemic," Baker said.
The governor, who became eligible to receive a vaccine himself on Monday, expects populations that have been hesitant to get vaccinated to seek out doses as soon as they see that the shots are effective.
"Almost all the data among the people who are hesitant is that they're not permanently hesitant. They just don't want to go first. And what they really want is to hear from a family member and friend, a coworker, a doctor that they know, somebody in the medical community," Baker said.
The governor expects that once there's more supply of vaccine to go around, local and state health groups will begin going door-to-door in some communities with low rates of vaccination.
"We've been talking to both the Archipelago [Strategies Group] folks and Health Care For All about how many doors do we think we can knock on in a lot of these communities," Baker said.
A common thread in Baker's policymaking throughout the last year have been the "future of work" and how the pandemic will alter commuting patterns, childcare needs and other factors. He expects a study currently being conducted with employers and unions to result in changes for the state's own employees and said that he'll attempt to mitigate the negative aspects of a more remote working culture.
"My great fear here is that if we don't pay attention to some of this, we may end up letting some really bad things happen to people and to communities that we would have been able to solve for if we'd been a little more focused on the fact that things weren't just going to be the way they always were before," Baker said.
Asked if the MBTA should continue its policy of cutting service while ridership is down during the pandemic, Baker, a Republican, was unmoved by Democratic U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch's recent crusade to reverse the cuts. Baker maintains that the transit authority should shrink to fit the unusually low demand.
"If riders show up, the T's in a pretty good position to make sure that it can service them, whether you're talking busses, commuter rail or rapid transit," Baker said. "But it's important to remember that the commuter rail is probably 10 to 13% of what it was at before the pandemic began."
