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Published: April 10, 2025
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Lately, I’ve noticed a growing chorus of people claiming that America’s response to COVID-19 — the shutdowns, the distancing, the masking — went too far.
And I get why people feel that way. The restrictions were painful, isolating, and disruptive. But here’s my concern: a lot of these conversations are shaped by a cognitive trap known as survivor bias.
What Is Survivor Bias and How Does It Affect COVID-19 Debates?
Survivor bias happens when the only voices we hear are from those who made it through an ordeal — while the stories of those who didn’t are absent. In the case of COVID, that’s more than 1.1 million Americans who died. It’s millions more struggling with Long COVID or post-COVID heart problems. It’s also the countless people who never got infected because the measures worked.
These are the voices we don’t hear enough from in today’s revisionist debates about COVID policy.
Were COVID Protection Measures Perfect? Of Course Not.
Every emergency response involves trade-offs. Policies need to be evaluated, mistakes acknowledged, and future plans improved. But I worry that survivor bias leads us to oversimplify what was, in reality, a brutally difficult set of decisions made under enormous uncertainty.
Business restrictions, behavior change, contact tracing, and vaccine requirements weren’t designed to make life less enjoyable. They were designed to avert illness and save lives — including the lives of people we might not see or know from a virus that spread through aerosols.
Why Does Survivor Bias Matter for Future Public Health Decisions?
As we prepare for future health emergencies, we need to resist the temptation to only listen to the loudest voices in the room. We also need to listen to those who can’t speak — because they didn’t survive.
Public health is about protecting everyone — not just those fortunate enough to make it through unscathed.
Whose Stories Will We Remember?
The next time you hear someone say COVID measures went too far, ask yourself: whose story are we missing? And what might they have told us if they were still here?
Read more at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fevered-mind/202504/who-decides-what-was-too-much-in-the-covid-19-response
