Category: Experts Guide

If you’re feeling more forgetful lately, you’re not alone. There’s growing research that shows that the pandemic has impacted our memory.

Memory development expert at UW-Madison Haley Vlack explains how pandemic stress and social isolation have negatively impacted our memory and how we can get it back.

“It turns out the pandemic is pretty much the perfect storm for forgetting. Many of the experiences that we’ve been going through over the past year, cause forgetting. For example, loosing our normal routine,” said Vlack. “Many of us have been multi-tasking. We’ve been challenged with care-taking and work all at the same time. We’ve been socially isolated.”

Quoted: While some estimates suggest communities can reach herd immunity when around 70 percent of the population is vaccinated, Dr. Matt Anderson, UW Health senior medical director of primary care, explains it isn’t an on-off switch.

“It’s really hard to say at what point we’ll reach it as though it’s a critical threshold,” Anderson said. “It’s more of a gradual decline in the case rates that we’ll see as we have more and more people being immune, and the best immunity is through vaccinations.”

Ajay Sethi is a professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is faculty director of Master of Public Health Program. He said it will be clear that communities have reached herd immunity when there are no longer outbreaks of COVID-19 despite people returning to pre-pandemic daily activities like going maskless to concerts, sporting events, movie theaters, or restaurants without social distancing.

“In order for this to happen, most everyone will need to have protective immunity from either vaccination or past infection, but immunity from the latter may not be as long-lasting or durable,” he said.

Social work professor Tova Walsh interviewed dozens of mothers who gave birth early in the pandemic. She herself had a baby in March 2020, just as Wisconsin’s stay-at-home orders went into effect. What she learned is that it’s been an unusual time for new parents, to say the least.

Interview with Christine Whelan, a clinical professor of consumer science at the School of Human Ecology.

Quoted: Christine Whelan, a clinical professor in the School of Human Ecology at UW-Madison, said that returning to everyday life is going to look different for each person.

“If you’re an introvert, perhaps the last 15 months or so has actually been a source of relief to you because you haven’t had to do a lot of the things that stress you out or that actually deplete your energy,” she said. “If that is you, then now’s a really good time to pick and choose what kind of in-person social events you’re going to want to add back into your life.”

Quoted: The inclination toward self-help is strong in this country. As Christine Whelan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who wrote her dissertation on the self-help industry, told me, “The NXIVM cult started out as a traditionally leadership self-help model of empowerment and behavior modification. …. the lessons that were being taught to the broad introductory group were fairly simple strategies for accomplishing goals in your life.”

But then, she notes, NXIVM faced the same problem that all personal-improvement workshops seem to face: “How do you continue to ‘transform’ people after they’ve completed the entry-level experiences?” she asks, adding: “You up the ante.”

Interview with Christine Whelan, clinical professor of consumer science at the School of Human Ecology.

Quoted: “The goal in all decisions is to minimize risk,” said Patrick Remington, an epidemiologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who formerly worked for the CDC.

“Assuming that the person who is immunocompromised is not able to be vaccinated, then it would be prudent for you to reduce your risk as much as possible, by continuing to wear a mask in public.”