The past just isn't what it used to be

Beware of false pandemic memories

People’s memories aren’t very reliable.

I’m not talking about the ability to recall facts, part of our short and long-term memory. I’m talking about the ability to accurately remember events as they happened.

I was reminded of this a couple of times recently. Firstly when a friend said “they couldn’t go anywhere for basically two years” because of lockdowns. And again when I came across this PBS article by a doctor who said the spike this winter/spring in flu and RSV is “likely related to decreased population immunity after two years of wearing face masks and social distancing.”

Months, years, who can really remember

You might know this is not true. Lockdowns (such as they were) in the west lasted a few months, on and off, in total. In the UK there was something approximating a lockdown from mid-March to early June 2020, with pubs and restaurants reopened in June, and cinemas and even kids soft play areas reopened in August. International travel was also back in summer 2020.

In late September 2020 indoor gatherings in the UK were banned, with a second official lockdown instituted in November, lifted for Christmas, re-imposed in January and then largely lifted in March, when kids went back to school. By July 2021, all restrictions were lifted. The full timeline is here.

In the US, some states never had a stay-at-home-order, and some only had one for that initial two-and-a-half month period from mid-March to June 2020.

It is true that in most countries large events such as concerts, festivals and sporting events were cancelled through to summer 2021. But in general, stay-at-home orders, or lockdowns, were patchy and lasted a few months in total.

As for international travel, other than that initial two-and-a-half month period, travel was not fully prohibited again, and allowable to most countries with quarantine/self-isolation on arrival, a negative covid test or, later, proof of vaccination. I moved country in September 2020, crossing two national borders with ease. Yet I bet if you asked a lot of people about September 2020, they’d say they were caged at home.

As for masks, there was no legal requirement to wear one anywhere in the UK beyond July 2021, although they became a legal requirement again in November for a few months on public transport and shops as omicron emerged.

In the US, the only federal level mask mandate lasted for 15 months from January 2021 and then only covered public transport. Even in states with better protections such as California, mask mandates were done by June 2021.

Yet in our collective cultural memory, pandemic lockdowns lasted two years and we were all muzzled for just as long.

A quick search on twitter for “locked down two years” comes up with result, after result, after result of people who referencing two year lockdowns. I have no doubt they and many others really believe lockdowns lasted two years.

The longest stay-at-home order in the west was Melbourne’s, at 262 days. A long time, but still far short of two years.

False memories

What we’re seeing play out at a social-psychological level is the human propensity to conjure up what psychologists call false memories. Or the recall of events that never happened. People’s memories are not fixed. They are significantly influenced by what people are told about what happened in the past, especially when the suggested past events contains both true and false information.

Research has confirmed this time and again.

In one study from the 70s, one-third of participants were persuaded that as children they nearly drowned and were rescued by a lifeguard. In another study, researchers convinced half of the subjects that they had been viciously attacked by an animal in their childhood.

Neither of these things had happened. The psychologists had hacked their memories by obtaining information from their parents about true events in their childhood (a day on the beach when the ocean was rough, a neighbour with a scary dog) and then manipulating these true memories with suggestive questioning and leading statements. Were you scared of the dog? How did you feel when the dog approached you? How did you feel when it bit you?

Memory isn’t constructive. It’s reconstructive. It can be edited. You can do it yourself. But other people can also do it to you.

A leading researcher in this field, Elizabeth Lotus, has shown that these memory distortions are relatively easily implanted in people and affect behaviours long after the pseudo-memories have taken hold. In one study, participants were convinced that as children they had become sick after eating strawberry ice cream. They hadn’t. But in follow up sessions, people said they had avoiding eating strawberry ice cream for years as a result.

Lotus also says there are social demands on how we remember things. If someone casually says in conversation “well you know because we were locked down for two years…” it places upon us in that moment a social demand to nod and agree, even if we might doubt the full accuracy of the statement. Because it isn’t conveyed as an opinion, but stated as a simple matter of casual fact, it feels awkward correcting it. Both people then carry this false memory onward, one with more conviction than the other, but even the doubtful person has had some of their doubt shaved off.

Suggestive media coverage, trauma

I’m sure many of you have come across the false pandemic memory. And it is not a surprise. Even progressive media outlets in June 2023 are telling us the reason kids and adults are so sick is because we were locked down for years with no social contact. World leaders have parroted the same line. Ipsos, one of the UK’s biggest polling companies has a series of polls about the pandemic titled: Two years of life under lockdown. The Guardian had a series in 2022 called Two years on: the legacy of lockdowns, which reinforced the idea of a two year lockdown. In general, media coverage of lockdowns has focused on their costs and negative effects. The implicit and sometimes explicit suggestion of most media coverage is that the costs were greater than the benefits. This may be playing into a generalised anger, and leading people to over-estimate their length. But how often have you heard of the research that found March-June 2020 lockdowns saved 3 million lives and prevented 530 million infections, and therefore great suffering and disability?

The other factor here is trauma. Research suggests a history of trauma renders people more vulnerable to false memories. Don’t get me wrong. The pandemic was a traumatic event. More than 20 million have probably died. For at least a year we had constant updates on the amount of people that were dying every day. Kids did get taught from home. Our normal routines were significantly altered. There was upheaval. But these true events have been stretched and manipulated by suggestive media coverage and self-serving politicians, and have cohered into a kind of truth by the social demands placed on us to agree how things were.

The need for control

False memories in the context of covid also have an additional benefit: they help buttress the need for control in the face of biological reality. If lockdowns - a political-social intervention - are the source of the ill (everyone being sick because of a lack of exposure to viruses), we have control over what happens next time. Whereas if what happened was due more to a scientific/biological reality, our sense of having control over subsequent events is weakened.

But this is dangerous. Because if enough people incorrectly recall events, the next time we have a pandemic virus (and it is a when, not if), the wrong decisions will be taken due to false collective memory about what happened the first time.

So, please, the next time someone brings up lockdowns in casual conversation, do your best to help correct the false memory.