The Pandemic You Already Forgot — and What It Cost

Transcript

Sam: Okay. I want to start with a confession, because it's the thing that sent me down this whole rabbit hole. The deadliest pandemic in modern history — and I can barely remember it.

Alex: Same. And that's the genuinely strange part, right? Not "it was hard." It's that the middle of it is just… gone.

Sam: Two years that ate half my working life, collapsed into one long grey day. And I felt vaguely guilty about that — like, what's wrong with me?

Alex: Here's the twist that makes this an episode and not a therapy session: it's not a flaw in you. The forgetting is the single most predictable thing pandemics do. There's a law of human memory underneath it. And once you see the law, the whole pandemic looks different.

Sam: A law that explains why we forget the worst thing that's happened to us in a century.

Alex: That's the rabbit hole. Let's go down it. Welcome back to Dan's Rabbit Holes — the show where we each take one thing we genuinely can't stop thinking about and chase it all the way to the bottom. One episode, one obsession, dug up and properly understood. I'm Alex, here with Sam.

Sam: And this is one of those ones that started as a nagging little itch and turned out to have a floor way further down than I expected. The itch was simple: why can't I remember my own pandemic?

Alex: So here's the journey today. We start with the weird memory science — why the very start of COVID is burned into you like glass, and the next year and a half is a smear. Then we use that science as a flashlight, and we walk back through what the forgetting actually swallowed: the four phases of the virus most people couldn't name now, a Sydney suburb that got cut in half by a bridge on Christmas Day, a fortress strategy that worked brilliantly right up until it completely didn't, and a cost-benefit fight that we have just… quietly walked away from without an answer.

Sam: And then the part that genuinely got under my skin — that the forgetting isn't harmless. There's a bill from COVID still landing on your kitchen table every single month, and most people have no idea the two things are connected.

Alex: We end somewhere unsettling. Not "here's what happened in COVID." But why a generation that lived through it is already losing it — and what that costs us, the next time the sirens go off. Which they will.

Sam: If that's your kind of rabbit hole — the one that starts small and personal and bottoms out somewhere much bigger — do one thing first: follow the show in whatever app you're in. It's free, and it means the next one just turns up for you. Right. Let's start with the strangest fact of all.

Alex: The deadliest pandemic in modern history, and most of the people who lived through it can barely remember it.

Sam: And when you say deadliest — give me the number, because I think people have lost the scale of this too.

Alex: They have. Confirmed, you're looking at around seven million deaths. But confirmed is a massive undercount — the honest excess-mortality figure, the World Health Organization's own work, puts it somewhere between fifteen and twenty million people, in two years.

Sam: Fifteen to twenty million.

Alex: And here's the thing that should stop you. Ask someone who ran, say, a corporate crisis team through the whole thing — someone whose entire job for two years was the pandemic — to just walk you through it. And what you usually get is a shrug. A couple of bright fragments. The morning the office emptied out. A fight over toilet paper. A vaccine queue.

Sam: The greatest hits. And then nothing.

Alex: And then nothing. The middle is gone. It's collapsed into one long, undifferentiated grey day. And that blankness — that's not a personal failing, and it's not even unusual. It is the rule. That's the thing I want to land before we go anywhere else: the forgetting is not the exception to the pandemic. It might be the most reliable thing about it.

Sam: Okay, but here's what's confusing me already. Because I don't remember nothing. There's one bit that's incredibly sharp — the day they sent us home. I can still see the desk I cleared.

Alex: And that's the key to the whole thing. Almost everyone has exactly that — one COVID memory that's sharp as glass. Usually it's that day. You cleared the desk, you grabbed the laptop bag, you made the half-joke that it'd be a couple of weeks.

Sam: It was not a couple of weeks.

Alex: It was not a couple of weeks. But here's the real question — why is that day so sharp when the rest is a fog? And the beautiful thing is, the same answer explains both. The pandemic announced itself as a clean, datable rupture. The WHO got told about a cluster of unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan on the very last day of 2019. Global emergency, the thirtieth of January 2020. Declared a pandemic on the eleventh of March.

Sam: And then it goes physical, fast.

Alex: In days. Borders shut. Shelves empty. Tens of millions of people walk out of an office they will not walk back into for a year or more. And psychologists who study how we build the story of our own lives have a word for a moment like that. They call it a transition.

Sam: A hinge.

Alex: A hinge. That's exactly the word. We file our whole lives by their hinges — the day we moved cities, changed jobs, had a kid, went to war. The transitions are the scaffolding that everything else hangs off. And that first month of COVID was one of the great collective hinges of the century. So your brain treated it like one. It encoded it beautifully.

Sam: So the sharp memory and the blur — they're not in tension. They're the same machine.

Alex: They're the same machine, just fed different food. Give that machine a hinge, it builds you a cathedral of memory. Give it monotony, it builds you almost nothing. And what it got after the hinge — that's the whole story.

Sam: So walk me into the mechanism. Because if my brain is so good at the rupture, why does it drop the entire next year on the floor?

Alex: There's a Canadian memory researcher, Norman Brown, who's spent years on exactly this. His idea is almost insultingly simple — it's called transition theory. The events that anchor your memory are the ones that mark a real change in how you live, day to day. Now point that at the pandemic, and it makes a sharp, testable prediction.

Sam: Go on.

Alex: The onset — the rupture — gives you a burst of vivid, well-stored memories. Brown literally calls it the COVID bump. But the long stretch of lockdown that comes after? That should produce the exact opposite. A hole. He calls it the lockdown dip — a gap in your memory where a whole year ought to be. And the elegance of it is that he predicted it from the theory before people went looking. It's not a vibe; it's a forecast that came true.

Sam: And the logic of the dip is what, exactly?

Alex: Memory feeds on distinctiveness. On change. And lockdown was the most changeless stretch of modern adult life. Same four walls. Same commute — bed to kitchen table. Same news. This Tuesday is last Tuesday is next Tuesday. And that gives the brain almost nothing to grab onto.

Sam: So think of it like — your memory is a recording device that only switches on when something new happens.

Alex: That's a really good way to put it, and you can push it further. It's a recording device that doesn't just need novelty to switch on — it uses novelty to mark the tape. The boundaries between your memories are made of change. Take the change away, and the tape just runs, unmarked, for a year.

Sam: So you can't find anything on it later because there are no chapter markers.

Alex: No chapter markers. Exactly. And there's a researcher, Dorthe Berntsen, who says it even more starkly. When experience is that uniform, she says, the memory "sort of puts it together as almost one event." So you don't have fifty separate memories of fifty days at home.

Sam: You have one.

Alex: You have one. One smeared composite of being at home. The lockdown didn't just feel like it lasted forever and no time at all — to your hippocampus, it basically was a single day.

Sam: That is genuinely a little horrifying. A year of your one life, recorded as a single day.

Alex: And it's not just the monotony doing it. There are actually four forces here, all pushing the same direction, and it's worth naming them because together they explain almost the whole effect. One is the monotony — the no-chapter-markers thing we just did. Two is overload. There's a psychologist, Suparna Rajaram, who points at sheer information overload: even powerful emotional events get harder to store when they arrive in a relentless, repetitive flood. And COVID was a firehose of frightening, samey information for the better part of two years.

Sam: So the volume of it actually worked against remembering it.

Alex: Counterintuitively, yes. More wasn't more. More was mush. Three is stress, and this one's well established now — an anxious brain is a poor recording device. The stress hormones literally interfere with the machinery that lays down new long-term memories. So the single most stressful period of most people's lives was also the period when their memory-formation was most chemically suppressed.

Sam: That's a brutal combination. The thing most worth remembering, recorded by the worst possible equipment.

Alex: The worst possible equipment, in the worst possible conditions. And four is interference — everything that's happened since. Normal life coming back, new crises, new news — it all overwrites the old, faint pandemic traces. Just ordinary forgetting, sanding them down a bit more every year.

Sam: So the brain wasn't even fighting to keep these.

Alex: No — and that's the deepest point in the whole science. Memory researchers love to say this: the default state of memory is not keeping things. It's forgetting. We forget almost everything, almost always. Retention is the rare exception, not the rule. The pandemic just handed the forgetting machine perfect conditions to do its job.

Sam: So the person who can't reconstruct their own lockdown —

Alex: — is not broken. Their memory is working exactly as designed. It grabbed the hinge, and it let the monotony evaporate. The only unsettling part is what that monotony was actually hiding. Because a lot happened in that grey blur.

Sam: Right, so let's do that — let's pull the things back out of the fog. Because when I try to lay COVID out as a sequence of distinct chapters, I genuinely can't. It's all one thing in my head.

Alex: Which is the dip, doing its work. But it did have distinct chapters — really clean ones. The whole pandemic is the story of one virus mutating faster than our defences, and it comes in four acts.

Sam: Okay. Act one.

Alex: Act one is the original strain, out of Wuhan, through early 2020. And the thing to hold onto about act one is that the fear was rational. No vaccine. No treatment. And a genuinely unknown lethality. Nobody knew yet how bad this was — and that uncertainty is its own kind of terror. That's why the early response was so absolute. You're defending against an enemy whose strength you can't even measure, so you assume the worst.

Sam: Act two.

Alex: Act two is Alpha. First picked up in Kent, in England, late 2020. Noticeably more transmissible, and it tore through that northern-hemisphere winter. Then act three — and in human terms this is the cruellest one — is Delta. First identified in India, late 2020. It's the engine of India's catastrophic second wave in April 2021, and it's genuinely a more dangerous virus, not just a more contagious one. It becomes the world's dominant strain through that whole year.

Sam: And then the one that ends the war.

Alex: Act four. Omicron. Reported to the WHO out of South Africa on the twenty-fourth of November 2021. Designated a variant of concern two days later. And it's wildly more contagious than anything before it — inside four weeks it had circled the planet and shoved Delta aside. But — and this is the crucial but — on average, milder. Especially if you were vaccinated.

Sam: So Omicron is the hinge of the whole pandemic.

Alex: It's the hinge from emergency to endemic. And here's why, mechanically: it made the strategy that had defined the first two years — keep the virus out, suppress every single case — first impossible, and then pointless. You cannot build a wall against a variant that infects a quarter of a city in a fortnight. The wall stops being a wall the moment the thing can get over it faster than you can patch it.

Sam: And here's what gets me. I lived through all four of those, and if you'd asked me to name them in order, cold, I'm not sure I could have done it. Each one felt completely different at the time.

Alex: Each one felt different, each one demanded a different policy, and almost none of that texture survives in normal memory. Which is exactly the problem we keep circling back to.

Sam: Okay, you've got me on the four acts. But you keep hinting there's a second forgotten thing stacked on top of the variants.

Alex: There is, and it might be even bigger. It's that those same four acts were lived on what were basically two different planets. The same month of the same pandemic looked nothing alike depending on where you were standing.

Sam: Give me the contrast.

Alex: While Australia and New Zealand sealed themselves off and lived close to normal behind the wall, most of the rest of the rich world took a completely different bargain — accept that the virus is going to spread, and just try to slow it enough that the hospitals don't get overwhelmed. Flatten the curve. Two totally different theories of how to survive the same thing.

Sam: Britain.

Alex: Britain locked down hard, but late, twice, and paid for it with one of the developed world's higher death tolls. The US fractured along political lines into a patchwork of states that barely talked to each other — and a mask became a tribal flag rather than a piece of cloth. Whether you covered your face stopped being about epidemiology and started being about which team you were on.

Sam: And India.

Alex: And then India, in April and May 2021. Delta. And this is the scene that, for me, defines the cruelty of the entire pandemic. Hospitals run out of oxygen. Families buying cylinders on the black market. Crematoria running day and night, and then spilling out into the car parks. Officially India recorded a few hundred thousand deaths in that wave. Serious excess-mortality estimates put the true number in the millions.

Sam: In the millions. In one wave.

Alex: In one wave, in one country. And hold that next to the other planet — a sealed, nearly-normal Australia, where the big news story that same season might be a single cluster of cases. Same month. Same pandemic. Completely different worlds.

Sam: And it wasn't just life-and-death that diverged, was it. It's that the whole emotional content of the period was different depending on where you stood.

Alex: Completely different. Think about it. If you were in Melbourne, your defining memory might be tedium — the longest lockdown on Earth, the same walk, the five-kilometre radius. If you were in a hospital in Delhi that April, your defining memory is something closer to a war zone. If you were in parts of the US, it was rage — at the rules, or at the people breaking them. Grief, boredom, fury, fear — all of it the "COVID experience," all of it incompatible.

Sam: So even the feeling of it won't line up between two people.

Alex: Won't line up at all. And that's a huge part of why the global memory is so incoherent. There's no single shared story to remember, because there was no single shared experience. Your pandemic depended almost entirely on which border you happened to be standing behind. There isn't a clean "we" who all went through the same thing — and a collective memory needs a "we" to hang on to. We came out of it without one.

Sam: Okay, I want to do something before we get to the policy. I want to try and recover the texture — the lived feel of it — because you keep saying that's the first thing to go, and honestly I can feel it going even as we talk.

Alex: Do it. Strip away the variants and the rules for a second. For a huge chunk of the workforce, the pandemic was the day the commute died, and your home became the office. The kitchen table colonised by a laptop and a ring light. The background-blur on the video call. The slow, grim discovery that "back in a couple of weeks" was a complete fiction.

Sam: And whole categories of life just… switched off. The gym. The pub. The gathering. The hug.

Alex: The hug. People queuing on tape crosses outside supermarkets that were rationing flour and — famously — toilet paper. And the toilet paper thing is genuinely interesting, because it's one of the few details almost everyone actually kept.

Sam: Why that one? Of everything that happened, why did the toilet paper survive?

Alex: Because it was strange enough to encode. It broke the monotony. It was absurd enough to be a transition in miniature — so the brain filed it. Which tells you something a bit unflattering about how memory works: the bits we kept are the bits that were weird, not the bits that mattered.

Sam: That's — wow, okay, that reframes the whole greatest-hits thing. We didn't keep the important parts. We kept the surreal parts.

Alex: We kept the surreal parts. The novelty, not the significance. And there was so much surreal texture we've let go of. The daily ritual of the press conference — the premier, or the chief health officer, reading out the day's case numbers like a weather report. A whole nation organising its mood around a single integer that came out at eleven a.m.

Sam: And the language. There was this entire vocabulary that came out of nowhere, and within weeks it felt like it had always existed. Social distancing. Flattening the curve. An abundance of caution. The new normal.

Alex: "You're on mute."

Sam: "You're on mute." And the small mercies and the small cruelties right next to each other — the banana bread, the sourdough starters, the clapping for healthcare workers — against funerals held over a video link. Grandparents met through glass.

Alex: Births and deaths attended by nobody. And it's important to stop here and say something, because the forgetting is not universal, and it would be glib to pretend it is. For the people for whom this was genuinely catastrophic — the bereaved, the healthcare workers who basically lived inside the wards, the immunocompromised who couldn't risk the outside world at all — none of this faded. For them it's seared in, permanently. The dip is a luxury of the people for whom the pandemic was mostly an interruption.

Sam: That's an important line to draw. The forgetting is, in a way, a marker of how lightly you got off.

Alex: That's exactly right, and it's a slightly uncomfortable thing to sit with. If you can't remember your pandemic, part of what that means is your pandemic was survivable enough to be boring. For the majority — for whom it was mostly an enormous, anxious, monotonous interruption — the texture is just gone. And here's the cruel irony at the very heart of it: the same sameness that defined the experience is the exact thing that guaranteed we wouldn't remember it.

Sam: Okay. You promised me a suburb cut in half by a bridge. I need this, because it sounds completely made up.

Alex: It sounds invented. And it's one of the most concrete things that happened in the entire Australian pandemic, and almost nobody outside that peninsula remembers it at all. So — northern edge of Sydney, December 2020. And you have to set the scene, because Australia at that point had pulled off something most of the rich world hadn't. It had basically kept the virus out. People were living a near-normal life, behind closed international borders, while Europe and the Americas were drowning in waves.

Sam: So this is the fortress, holding.

Alex: The fortress, holding. And then — the sixteenth of December — the public health unit gets told about two infected residents of Avalon Beach. They know each other. No known source. Which, in a near-zero country, is the scariest possible combination.

Sam: Because if you can't trace it, you can't be sure how far it's already gone.

Alex: Exactly. Within four days, cases are arriving at around twenty a day. And the trigger turns out to be two social events at local community clubs in mid-December. Superspreader gatherings. The kind of completely ordinary suburban Christmas function that, in that one year, became a vector.

Sam: A Christmas party as a weapon.

Alex: Essentially. So on the nineteenth of December, around a quarter of a million people across the Northern Beaches get put under a hard stay-at-home order. Sealed off from the rest of the city. And then — this is the detail that still gets me — on the twenty-third of December, with Christmas bearing down and the outbreak concentrated in the north of the peninsula, the state premier does something genuinely bizarre. She splits the Northern Beaches in two. Along a line. At the Narrabeen Bridge.

Sam: Splits it how? Like, legally?

Alex: Legally. North of the line — the harder-hit zone — you're locked in, and you can host at most five visitors, only from inside your own zone, on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day. South of the line, the rules are looser: up to ten guests, plus young kids on top.

Sam: So I could be standing in my front yard, and my neighbour, a five-minute walk away, is living under a different law. For Christmas.

Alex: For Christmas. Two halves of the same beachside community, neighbours within walking distance, living under materially different rules — because of which side of a bridge their house happened to sit on.

Sam: That is the most surreal thing I've heard in ages, and I lived through this and have zero memory of it.

Alex: And here's the kicker, the bit that ties it back to the whole episode. The whole thing was contained with what now looks like astonishing thoroughness. An estimated forty percent of residents were tested inside five days. The cluster topped out at a hundred and fifty-one confirmed cases — genomic sequencing tied another thirteen across the state to it — and the order was lifted on the ninth of January.

Sam: A hundred and fifty-one cases.

Alex: A quarter of a million people locked down. A global news story. A community cut in half on Christmas Day. Over a cluster of a hundred and fifty-one. Which, by the standards of what was coming just six months later, was a rounding error.

Sam: And that's the thing, isn't it. The reason it's so forgotten isn't that it was small or unimportant. It's that it got swamped. It's a distinct, vivid hinge that just got buried under everything that came after.

Alex: It got buried under the grey. And that's the perfect demonstration of the whole mechanism, in miniature. Here is a sharp, weird, datable event — exactly the kind of thing memory should love — and even it couldn't survive being followed by a year of sameness and a much bigger catastrophe. Hold onto that, because the next chapter is the grey arriving in force.

Sam: So the bridge thing only makes sense inside the bigger strategy. This "Fortress Australia" idea. Lay it out for me, because I think this is one of the great forgotten experiments of the whole era.

Alex: It really is. While most of the world accepted mass infection as basically inevitable and just tried to flatten the curve, Australia — with New Zealand and a handful of others — went for something far more ambitious. Suppression to near-zero. A fortress, sealed by closed international borders and absolutely ferocious local responses to any leak. The Northern Beaches was one of those ferocious responses — that's why a hundred and fifty-one cases triggered a quarter-million-person lockdown. In a near-zero country, every cluster is a five-alarm fire.

Sam: And the timeline of the fortress is worth getting straight, because I've genuinely lost it.

Alex: First case lands the twenty-fifth of January 2020. By the nineteenth of March, the cruise ship Ruby Princess disembarks twenty-seven hundred passengers in Sydney —

Sam: Oh, the Ruby Princess. That one I do remember.

Alex: Everyone remembers the Ruby Princess, and it's worth asking why — and the answer is straight out of the memory science. It was a scandal. A clean villain, a discrete event, a single decision that went catastrophically wrong. It had a narrative. So it stuck. It became one of the country's worst single seeding events, eventually linked to hundreds of infections and dozens of deaths. On the twenty-second of March, New South Wales and Victoria shut non-essential services. States slam their own borders shut against each other — Australian states, against other Australian states.

Sam: Which is constitutionally wild, by the way.

Alex: Constitutionally wild. Internal borders, between states of the same country, closed by police checkpoints. And on the thirty-first of March the federal government announces JobKeeper — a wage subsidy first billed at a hundred and thirty billion dollars. The largest economic intervention in the nation's history. And a brand new body, the National Cabinet, basically takes over running the country.

Sam: And the fortress held.

Alex: For more than a year, the fortress held. And life inside it was — by the standards of the world outside — close to normal. Restaurants open. Crowds at the cricket. And that, honestly, is the single hardest part to remember now, because it ended so completely. We had something genuinely rare and a lot of the world envied, and then it just evaporated, and we mostly remember the end, not the year of near-normal that preceded it.

Sam: So when does it break? Give me the day.

Alex: It breaks on a specific day. The sixteenth of June 2021. A driver ferrying international flight crew around Sydney tests positive. To Delta.

Sam: The cruel one.

Alex: The cruel one. From that single case, an outbreak spreads through the eastern suburbs — the Bondi cluster — and then, fatefully, out into the working-class west and south-west of the city, where it becomes almost impossible to suppress. And what follows is the harshest sustained restriction in the state's history. Sydney goes into a lockdown that lasts a hundred and six days.

Sam: A hundred and six days.

Alex: Ending only on the eleventh of October. And here's where it gets pointed — because this is the inequality made concrete. As cases concentrated in twelve "local government areas of concern" — overwhelmingly the city's less wealthy, more crowded west — those areas got rules the leafy eastern suburbs simply never faced. A nightly nine-pm-to-five-am curfew. Tighter movement limits. A heavier police, and even military, presence on the streets.

Sam: Wait — military? On the streets of Sydney?

Alex: Soldiers, on the streets, enforcing a lockdown in specific postcodes. More than eighty percent of community transmission was happening in those twelve areas, and the response mapped almost perfectly onto existing lines of class and geography. Same virus. Same city. Two completely different lockdowns, depending on your postcode.

Sam: And that's the part nobody's really reckoned with, I think.

Alex: It's the part that got forgotten fastest, precisely because it was uncomfortable — and we'll come back to why the uncomfortable things get forgotten on purpose. And it was even worse nine hundred kilometres south. Melbourne racked up two hundred and sixty-two days of lockdown across the pandemic.

Sam: Two hundred and sixty-two —

Alex: The most of any city on Earth. A record so extreme it's basically become part of Melbourne's civic identity. And here's the brutal irony — the thing that should make you a little angry. The strategy that justified all of it had, by then, already been overtaken by events. The reopening was pegged explicitly to vaccination — freedoms come back at seventy, then eighty percent of adults double-dosed. New South Wales hits the marks, the pubs reopen in October to genuine euphoria —

Sam: And then.

Alex: And then, within weeks, Omicron arrives, and makes the entire painstaking, postcode-by-postcode suppression machine obsolete. Australia spent two years and the better part of a trillion dollars keeping the virus out — and then, almost overnight, chose to let it in. Because the alternative had become unwinnable.

Sam: There's something almost tragic in that. All that effort, and the exit was just… a different virus showing up.

Alex: The exit was vaccines and a milder variant, not the wall. The wall bought time. And the whole question of whether the time was worth the price — that's the one we most need to have answered, and the one we've completely walked away from. So let me draw the thread together, because this is the turn the whole episode has been building to. We've established the dip — why we forget. We've pulled the big things back out of the fog: the four acts, the bridge, the fortress, the hundred-and-six days. But here is where the forgetting gets genuinely dangerous. Because this next question is the one we most need answered before the next pandemic — and we've quietly walked away from it without an answer.

Sam: Which question?

Alex: Did the fortress work? Was it worth it?

Sam: And the honest answer is —

Alex: The honest answer is we genuinely don't know, and it's a real fight, with serious people on both sides. On one reading, Australia's strategy was a triumph, full stop. Through the deadliest phases — before vaccines even existed — the country recorded around nine hundred and ten COVID deaths.

Sam: Nine hundred. For a whole country. Through the very worst of it, before any vaccine.

Alex: An extraordinarily low toll by any global standard. To put it in proportion, plenty of comparable countries lost that many people in a bad week. And Australia reopened only once most of the population was protected. By the measure of disease prevented and lives saved in those dangerous early years, the country looks like a global exemplar — and a lot of serious public-health researchers will defend it as exactly that.

Sam: And there's a deeper thread in here too, isn't there — about how those decisions even got made.

Alex: There really is, and it's worth a quick aside, because we pulled that exact thread on this show before. Think about what actually happened to power in that moment. Emergency authority concentrated almost overnight into a brand-new National Cabinet. Premiers wielding border closures against each other. A country that's normally allergic to being told what to do, suddenly accepting some of the strictest controls on the planet.

Sam: Power that's normally invisible, suddenly visible.

Alex: Suddenly visible — and then, when the emergency passed, mostly receding again. If that grabs you — who actually runs the country when the normal rules get suspended — we went all the way down that one in episode two, "Who Really Runs Australia," a few weeks back. The pandemic is, in a sense, the most extreme stress-test that question has ever had. Anyway — back to the ledger, because there's a brutal other side to all of this.

Sam: Right, because nine hundred deaths sounds like a slam dunk. Where's the catch?

Alex: The catch is the cost. Australia's pandemic response — including some of the longest lockdowns on Earth — has been costed at around nine hundred and thirty-five billion dollars.

Sam: Nearly a trillion.

Alex: And the critics — and this is a serious strand of the academic literature, not a fringe — argue that when you tally the full ledger, the lockdowns destroyed far more wellbeing than they preserved. Lost years of schooling. Delayed cancer diagnoses, postponed procedures. A mental-health crisis among the young. Domestic violence behind closed doors. Isolation, especially of the old.

Sam: So how does that net out? Did the critics actually put a number on it?

Alex: Some of these cost-benefit analyses reach genuinely startling conclusions — claiming the costs ran tens of times higher than the benefits. And I want to be really careful here, because this is exactly where these debates tend to go off the rails. Those particular ratios are contested, and they rest on heavy assumptions — how do you value a year of human life, in dollars, and crucially, what would have happened without the lockdowns?

Sam: The thing nobody can actually know.

Alex: The thing nobody can know. So those eye-watering ratios are the critics' high-end case — not settled fact. But — and this is the part that does survive the scrutiny — the underlying point holds. The bill was colossal, and a great deal of it landed on people who were never at serious risk from the virus. Kids who lost school. Young people who lost years. That's real, whatever you think of the ratios.

Sam: And globally? Is the lockdown question any clearer outside Australia?

Alex: Genuinely mixed, and this is the part that should make everyone humble. One influential meta-analysis concluded that lockdowns in the US and Europe had, at best, a marginal effect on COVID deaths — partly because people changed their own behaviour, stayed home, got scared, whether or not the law told them to.

Sam: And the other side?

Alex: Other careful retrospective analyses found the complete opposite — that mitigation in 2020 saved hundreds of thousands, even over a million lives, far more than the economic downturn cost. And both of those cannot be fully right.

Sam: So which is it?

Alex: And that's the honest, uncomfortable answer: the cost-benefit of lockdowns is one of the hardest questions in all of applied social science. Because the counterfactual — what a world without them actually looks like — is unknowable. There's no control planet. And everyone's private estimate of that ghost world is quietly doing all the heavy lifting in their argument. You tell me what you assume would have happened without lockdowns, and I can predict which side you land on.

Sam: Okay, but here's why this isn't just an academic shrug, right? This is the thing we most need to have settled.

Alex: That's the whole point, and it's where the forgetting bites. That uncertainty is exactly the kind of thing a society forgets at its peril. Because the next time the sirens go off, the muscle memory of "we did this, and it cost us this much, for this much benefit" — that's the thing that should temper the response, in either direction. And we are losing it. We never finished the argument. And now we're letting ourselves forget there was even an argument to finish.

Sam: Okay. You keep teasing this. The bill that's still landing on my kitchen table. Cash it out for me.

Alex: So if you want hard proof that forgetting the pandemic does not make you stop paying for it — just look at the prices in the shops. Because the single most durable consequence of COVID, for most households, wasn't the virus at all. It was inflation. And inflation was, to a meaningful degree, a policy choice. Made in the panic of 2020 and 2021.

Sam: A choice. Not a force of nature.

Alex: Not a force of nature — and that's the era's defining myth I really want to puncture. The mechanism isn't even mysterious. You've got an economy in freefall, so governments across the rich world do something basically unprecedented in peacetime — they hand out enormous sums of money. Wage subsidies, stimulus cheques, expanded benefits. And at the same time, central banks pin interest rates near zero and buy up assets on a massive scale. They flood the system with money.

Sam: And the intent there is good, presumably.

Alex: The intent is humane, and in the short term it largely worked — it stopped the bottom falling out, it kept people in their homes and businesses alive. But here's the trap. It poured a tidal wave of demand into economies whose supply side was simultaneously seized up — by lockdowns, by sick workers, by snarled-up global shipping. So you've got too much money, chasing too few goods.

Sam: And prices do what prices do.

Alex: Prices do exactly what prices always do, when there's more money than stuff. Now — the obvious objection is, "okay, but how much of the inflation was actually the stimulus? Maybe that's just a story." And the good news is, economists have genuinely tried to measure it. And the answer is "a large and uncomfortable chunk."

Sam: Give me a number.

Alex: Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco estimated that the US's fiscal support added roughly two-point-six percentage points to inflation — and that America's outsized stimulus is a big part of why US inflation ran hotter than other rich countries'. And separate work associated with Johns Hopkins and the Chicago Fed put "fiscal inflation" at around half of the total price surge.

Sam: Half. Of the whole thing.

Alex: Around half, on that estimate. Now — the honest caveat, because I don't want to overclaim, and this is where a lot of hot takes get it wrong. Stimulus was not the whole story. There was a brutal run of supply shocks, energy spikes, a war in Europe, chronic under-investment in supply chains. Serious economists insist no single cause explains all of it, and they're right.

Sam: But "it came from nowhere" is just false.

Alex: "It came from nowhere, it was an act of god" is false. A great deal of it was manufactured — deliberately — as the price of cushioning the lockdowns. And this is the line I keep coming back to: the lockdowns and the inflation are not two separate stories. They're the same story. And the second half of it is still being told, every single time the rent goes up.

Sam: And there's a political sting in this too, isn't there. Because at the time, the spending was popular.

Alex: Almost universally popular. It kept businesses alive and money in people's pockets when the economy was in free-fall. And almost no politician of any stripe — left or right — wanted to be the one arguing for restraint while people were losing their jobs. Which is exactly why the inflation that followed has been so politically toxic and so widely misattributed.

Sam: Because nobody wanted to own it.

Alex: Nobody wanted to own it. The spending was a shared decision, made in a moment of collective fear — and the cost came due long after, when the fear had passed, and suddenly it was nobody's fault and everybody's problem. And look — you can make a serious argument both ways. One: having decided to lock down, the rich world had little choice but to spend on that scale to make the lockdowns survivable. On that reading, the inflation was the unavoidable price of a humane response.

Sam: And the other way?

Alex: The other reading: the spending ran well past what was actually needed, kept running after the emergency had eased, and the inflation was the avoidable price of overreach. Both of those are genuinely defensible. What is not defensible — and this is the whole point — is pretending there was no connection at all. That the inflation just descended on us, unrelated to anything we chose.

Sam: And the chain from the one to the other is genuinely invisible to most people, right? You feel the end of it, never the start.

Alex: That's the whole tragedy in one image. The chain runs: lockdown, then the emergency money to make the lockdown survivable, then too much money chasing too few goods, then prices — and what you actually feel, years later, is the price on the shelf and the rent on the door. Four links, stretched across four years. And almost nobody traces the last link back to the first.

Sam: And by the time you feel the last link, the first link is completely out of memory.

Alex: Completely out of memory. Which is exactly why this is the heart of why the forgetting matters. The experience faded —

Sam: — but the consequence did not.

Alex: The consequence did not. People who can't remember a single specific day of their own lockdown are nonetheless living, right now, inside its single longest-lasting effect. They feel it every single week, at the checkout. And most of them have no idea that the thing they can't remember and the bill they can't escape are, in fact, the same event.

Sam: Okay, but here's where I want to push back a little, or at least test it. Everything you're describing — the forgetting, how fast it's happening — is that actually new? Or is this just what humans always do?

Alex: It's the best question you could ask, and the answer is genuinely reassuring and genuinely bleak at the same time. None of this is new. If anything it's depressingly, reliably normal. And the proof is the worst pandemic in modern history — which you have almost certainly never spent ten minutes thinking about.

Sam: Nineteen-eighteen.

Alex: Nineteen-eighteen. The flu. It infected maybe a third of all humanity and killed somewhere between fifty and a hundred million people — on a far smaller planet than today's. By some measures it's the single greatest mortality event in human history. Deadlier than the World War it was running alongside.

Sam: Deadlier than the First World War.

Alex: Deadlier than the war. And then it just… disappeared from public consciousness. There's a historian, Guy Beiner, who's spent his career on this, and he documents what he calls "social forgetting." Within a decade or two, the great flu had been written almost entirely out of the cultural memory of the very societies it devastated. It survives as a footnote to the First World War, if it shows up in the history books at all.

Sam: So the intuition I'd absolutely have walked in here with — that an event gets remembered in proportion to how many people it killed —

Alex: — is just demonstrably, measurably wrong. There's no straight line from body count to memory. Beiner's whole life's work is documenting how a catastrophe on that scale could be hushed almost into silence.

Sam: So why? Why does a thing that kills fifty million people simply vanish?

Alex: Two reasons, and they both apply to us right now, which is the unnerving bit. One is overshadowing. The flu ran alongside a war that came with parades, monuments, poetry, a clear moral story — good guys, bad guys, a victory you could carve into stone. And a pandemic can't compete for the culture's attention, because it's random, it's invisible, there's no enemy to blame and no glory to claim. You can't build a monument to "a virus happened and a lot of people died indoors."

Sam: There's no narrative hook.

Alex: There's no narrative hook. And the second reason is the same psychology we've been describing all episode, just operating at the scale of a whole society. Trauma that people actively turned away from. An experience too diffuse and too grim to build into a shared story. A collective desire to just… move on, and never speak of it again.

Sam: Which means — wait. When COVID hit, we'd basically have to rediscover 1918 from scratch.

Alex: From scratch. As if it were news. We had forgotten our own single best case study in the exact thing that was happening to us, right when we needed it most. And that — that's the warning shot. Because by every available sign, we are on the identical trajectory with COVID. The interest in pandemics that COVID briefly reawakened is already cooling. The books, the documentaries, they're tapering off. And the experience is sliding into the same fog that swallowed 1918.

Sam: But you said, way back at the start, there are two kinds of forgetting. The dip is the passive one — the brain just failing to record. What's the second?

Alex: The second one is active, and it's the nastier of the two. The dip is forgetting that happens to you, mechanically, without your consent. But there's a second force, and it's the desire to not remember. Psychologists call it motivated forgetting.

Sam: As in, the mind choosing to look away.

Alex: The mind actively choosing to suppress, to bury, to simply refuse to revisit experiences that are painful or frightening or shameful. And the pandemic was, for almost everyone, some mix of all three. A frightening brush with mortality. A humiliating loss of control over your own life. A long grey grief for the ordinary world that got suspended.

Sam: And for a lot of people, a season of decisions they'd genuinely rather not look at again.

Alex: Exactly that. Who to let into the house. Whose funeral to miss. Which rule to quietly break. And faced with all of that, the natural human move is not to sit with the memory and turn it over and consolidate it. It's to turn away. To declare the thing over. To get back to normal as fast and as totally as humanly possible.

Sam: And here's the bit that loops right back to the science from the start — every time we refuse to revisit it, we make it fade faster.

Alex: That's the cruel feedback loop, and it's the link between the two amnesias. Memories get strengthened by recall and weakened by neglect. That's just how the machine works. So the collective rush to "move on" was, in pure memory terms, a collective decision to forget. The passive forgetting and the active forgetting feed each other. We chose this, and then the choosing made the forgetting easier.

Sam: And the really troubling part is that the active forgetting doesn't just erase the experience.

Alex: It erases the lessons. That's the half that genuinely worries me. Because it is psychologically far more comfortable to believe the pandemic was a freak event that simply happened to us — an act of nature, no human decisions to interrogate — than to do the hard, uncomfortable work of asking what we got right, what we got wrong, and what it actually cost. Motivated forgetting protects us from that discomfort. It quietly edits the whole episode down to a vague bad dream. And the 1918 generation did precisely this — turned hard toward the future, toward the post-war boom, and left the flu unspoken for fifty years.

Sam: And we're running the exact same play.

Alex: The exact same play, on a faster clock. And the cost is identical: the experience and its lessons go together, into the same fog.

Sam: So let's land this. Because it would be really easy to file all of this under "melancholy." Sad that we lose our memories, poignant that the years blur, isn't that a shame. But you keep insisting the stakes are sharper than that.

Alex: They are much sharper than that, and they point in exactly one direction: the next pandemic.

Sam: There will be another one.

Alex: There will be another one. The brutal lesson of the last century is that these are not once-in-history events. They recur. And when the next one comes, the single most valuable asset a society can have is an honest, well-organised memory of the last one.

Sam: Spell out what that memory actually buys you. Concretely.

Alex: It buys you calibration. What the early days of an unknown virus actually feel like — so that both panic and complacency get tempered by experience instead of guesswork. Which interventions earned their staggering costs, and which ones didn't. How to print emergency money without lighting an inflation fire that burns for years. How to avoid loading the heaviest burdens onto the people with the least — the way the postcode lockdowns did.

Sam: And all of that is institutional knowledge.

Alex: All of it is institutional knowledge. And here's the killer, the thing that should worry you most: institutional knowledge decays exactly the way personal memory does. Faster, if anything — because the people who actually held it move on, retire, leave the agency. And the whole cultural pressure to "get back to normal" actively discourages the painful work of writing it down while it's fresh.

Sam: So the unsettled cost-benefit fight from earlier — that's not a footnote. That's the actual danger.

Alex: That's the danger, right there. If we never honestly answer whether the lockdowns were worth it — and right now, we are not even trying — then the next response gets improvised from scratch. Swinging wildly between the poles of the last fight — overcorrecting, or undercorrecting — instead of being calibrated by its evidence. The inability to recall your own 2021 feels personal and harmless. It is the individual symptom of a collective amnesia that has real, sharp teeth.

Sam: Okay — so before we lose it entirely, can we actually name some of the lessons? Out loud. While the memory's still warm enough to write them down?

Alex: Yes. And they're concrete, every one of them. The early days taught us that a fast, hard response to an unknown pathogen buys time that is genuinely priceless — but also that the cost of suppression compounds the longer it runs. So a strategy that's exactly right in month one can be flatly wrong by month twelve. And the single hardest skill of the whole thing is knowing when to switch.

Sam: That's lesson one. The Delta winter?

Alex: The Delta winter taught us that crisis burdens fall unequally by default. They load the heaviest restrictions onto the people with the least room to absorb them — unless someone deliberately, consciously designs against it. The reopening taught us that vaccines, not walls, were the actual exit — and that a fortress with no plan for the day it has to open is only ever buying time, at enormous expense.

Sam: And the money.

Alex: And the inflation taught us that emergency money is never free. The cushion and the consequence are the same act. And the bill arrives years later, exactly when the connection has been forgotten. None of those four lessons is exotic. None of them is hard to state. And yet every single one of them is already slipping out of the conversation — because the experience that would keep them vivid is slipping out with them.

Sam: So let me try to say the whole thing back, because I think I've actually got it now. The most honest thing we can say about COVID is that the people who lived through it are losing it in real time …