Learning from the COVID-19 pandemic: Avoiding the availability bias and developing healthcare resilience
This availability bias also affects healthcare systems. Specifically, it is tantamount to how we process and learn from the COVID-19 pandemic. As countries begin to take a stronger hold of COVID-19 over the coming months and years, the conversation will shift towards what we can learn from COVID-19, and how we can stop something like it from happening again. But precisely in that framing lies the availability heuristic we must avoid: ‘something like it’. A framework tinted by the availability heuristic is frequently insufficient in forecasting, leaving us with low quality and incomplete information, which unsurprisingly leads to low quality and incomplete solutions.