A Theory of COVID Peak and End

How will we remember COVID? What memories will linger with us in years to come? That might all depend on who “we” are in those questions.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s research showed the many ways in which we all act irrationally and behave according to biases and heuristics in our everyday lives. Kahneman and Tversky helped identify ideas like loss aversion, the anchoring effect and the representativeness heuristic, which a) demonstrated they weren’t very good at thinking of catchy names that roll off the tongue, b) paved the way for behavioural economics and our modern understanding of decision-making, and c) made it clear just how self-serving and full of shit we can all be in our thinking.

(Of course, just like anything else in social science, the Replication Crisis Monster is hovering near their body of their work, taking wild swipes at it, and often connecting.)

Some of Kahneman’s later research focused on something called Peak-End theory. Again, this shows people’s basic irrationality, as it indicates that our memories of an event, whether positive or negative, are relative and don’t always match the content of the event. Basically, the idea is that what we remember about an experience has more to do with how it ended than with anything else about it, including its duration.

If we experience something prolonged and painful, like childbirth or a colonoscopy, but it ends relatively painlessly (e.g. with a blissful epidural), we will have a more positive memory of the event afterward (much more so than if it was the opposite—a relatively placid experience that somehow ended painfully, like stubbing our toe after a warm bath). How long the experience lasts doesn’t really matter in our memory of it.

I’ve been thinking about how Peak-End theory might apply to how we will ultimately remember COVID-19, especially given that different places in the world are going to experience different end-points to the pandemic (and dissimilar trajectories on the way there).

Countries like the US or the UK will have experienced a much worse low point—more hospitalisations, more deaths, more economic chaos—than countries like Australia or Taiwan. But their quick vaccination campaigns could make their end-point seem like a positive outcome, relatively speaking, and that might be the memory that stays in people’s minds.

Australia, on the other hand, will have been spared much of the death and trauma of peak-COVID, but continuous snap lockdowns, prolonged vaccination campaigns, and being unable to open up the country for years to come might end up leaving the population with a sour aftertaste.

Paradoxically, it’s possible that in 2030, an Australian or a Taiwanese person will remember COVID as being worse than a Brit or an American. Which would be not only deeply weird, but also terribly human.