SHAUN READ: Mass amnesia could cause loss of Covid-19 lessons

The Covid-19 pandemic can easily be classified as a once-in-a-generation event that affected every dimension of our lives, brought a globalised world to a near standstill and killed about 20-million people of all races, nationalities and economic classes. 

Yet, barely five years on, the pandemic and its effects hardly feature in our social discourse. Indeed, unlike equally devastating wars and conflicts, you will struggle to find any films, plays, books and the like, that feature the pandemic as a main event. Why is this the case?

Neuroscientists have sought to explain this mass amnesia by how the brain processes memories. Information received by the brain goes through at least three phases: encoding, consolidation and retrieval of information.

New information is first encoded in neurons in the memory centres in the brain, such as the hippocampus, resulting in a physical memory imprint, known as an engram. During the consolidation phase (usually while we are asleep), these memory centres “replay” the imprinted memories for longer-term storage, some speculate in a Google-like index.

When we retrieve the memory during the retrieval (that is remembering) phase, our memories are affected by our present situation and additional information, and therefore memories change slightly each time we access them. This perhaps explains why two people witnessing the same event have a different recollection of it and may also explain the tendency for memories to fade over time. 

Contrary to popular belief, the brain’s default is to forget rather than to retain memories, to avoid a system overload. Memories of traumatic events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, are often the first to go. Furthermore, the sheer weight of the information coming our way daily during the Covid-19 pandemic meant that our brains could simply not retain all the information.

Perhaps less obvious is that we imprint memories more easily when they are linked to compelling moral narratives. For instance, memories of war and conflict feature heroes, villains and moral causes and such concepts are long embedded in society. However, natural events fall largely outside human agency and control and so do not lend themselves to lasting memory. As one author put it, how do we ascribe moral blame to a virus molecule? For this reason, while there are numerous memorials to the fallen of World War 1 there are few if any memorials to victims of the 1918 Spanish Flu, even though it killed more people. 

It is therefore no surprise that what we remember most from the Covid-19 pandemic is not the daily trauma and deaths of millions, but rather the scandals that surrounded the pandemic, such as the source of the outbreak (lab leak or wet market), government responses (including parties at 10 Downing Street) and the pro-vaccine versus antivaccine debates, each of which have their own moral narrative.

The danger of this mass amnesia is that the lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic will be lost in the mists of time, as was the case with the Spanish Flu. The absence of a global pandemic for 100 years mean that warning signals were dismissed or ignored. Time Magazine published a front-page article, “Warning: We Are Not Ready For The Next Pandemic.” The date of the publication: May 18 2017.   

Misinformation, disinformation, underfunding of public healthcare and political polarisation all hindered the treatment of the Spanish Flu. These same errors were repeated 100 years later. Why? Because we had forgotten them.

• Shaun Read is CEO and founder of Read Advisory Services.