Why are we forgetting the pandemic already?
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2023
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
While the coronavirus emergency declaration officially ends this week, neuroscientist-turned-science-journalist Richard Sima has been pondering this question: Why are so many of us starting to forget much of the pandemic?
The coronavirus pandemic is a historic event that has impacted everyone across the world. And yet, “given the quirks of human memory,” many of us may not remember much about this time, Sima tells “Post Reports.”
Today, we dig into the science of why many of our brains may be losing our pandemic memories, and how we can still honor and learn from our experiences.
Read more:
Science of forgetting: Why we’re already losing our pandemic memories
What the end of the covid public health emergency means for you.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This month, COVID emergency measures are finally expiring in the U.S. and around the world. |
| 0:09.7 | Make no mistake, COVID is still here, but this new phase means the end of things like |
| 0:16.3 | federal vaccine mandates and free COVID tests. |
| 0:21.6 | Over the next two episodes, we're going to unpack what all this means for us. |
| 0:25.9 | To start, we're turning to one of my colleagues here on the Post-Wellbeing Desk, Richard |
| 0:30.4 | SEMA, Richard's a neuroscientist, turned science journalist, and he's been trying to understand |
| 0:35.9 | how our brains are remembering the pandemic and what we've gone through. |
| 0:43.1 | Just thinking back on the past three years, I realized that there's a lot that I am forgetting, |
| 0:50.4 | and I suspect that this is the case for many people simply because of the quirks of human |
| 0:55.0 | memory. |
| 0:56.0 | For me, it's just there's a time before the pandemic and after. |
| 1:03.6 | Most of my memories about the pandemic are right when it started, and then it's like, |
| 1:07.5 | nothing. |
| 1:08.5 | We would like to just forget the time because it was very tough. |
| 1:14.2 | Seems like a lifetime ago, but it was just a couple of years ago, but it seems like a |
| 1:18.1 | different world. |
| 1:19.1 | Sitting on the couch, watching what's the show called. |
| 1:23.4 | What was the tagger show? |
| 1:28.1 | And it's just fascinating to me that, of course, this is such a historic, important event |
| 1:33.0 | that impacted us all, and yet we're not going to remember many of the details, many of |
| 1:38.6 | the experiences we had. |
| 1:45.7 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. |
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