As Melbourne’s 5 million residents grapple with a soul-crushing second period of COVID-19 restrictions, we are once again faced with dozens of choices every day that in small ways can either increase or decrease the risk to the community.

Do I take a wide berth as that person comes toward me on my morning walk? Do I actually wash my hands for the full 20 seconds? Do I bother to take a face mask to the supermarket? Do I really need to go to the supermarket at all?

It can feel relentless. But, reflecting on my experience of the last few months, I keep coming back to one thing that has, more than anything else, jolted me out of my complacency and keeps motivating me whenever I find myself being tempted to cut corners.

It isn’t the messaging from public health officials about doing the right thing for the common good, or chastisement about the dangers of doing the wrong thing. It isn’t messages about how dangerous COVID-19 can be, or suggestions that we should all act as if we have the virus.

It’s the story of Vitor Godhino.

Godhino was a futsal-loving teenager from Porto, Portugal. He died on March 29 after contracting COVID-19, despite having no underlying serious health conditions. He was 14.

It was shocking because my son is the same age and, before the moment I heard about Vitor, I had seen my boy as being protected from the dangers of the pandemic because of his age and good health. Vitor’s death obliterated that myth for me. After reading the story I thought about Godhino and the family and friends who were in shock and, more importantly, the person who transmitted the virus to him, possibly through a small act of complacency. Was it a family member? Was it someone who now has to live with that forever?

What if I killed my son, i thought, because I was worried about looking impolite in response to a colleague’s impulsive handshake? It's a scenario that's extremely unlikely, but Vitor's story showed that it is not impossible.

Today, as official figures show more than 576,000 coronavirus related deaths around the world, the planet is heaving with stories of grief and sadness and, yes, those people left behind who must bear the weight of poor decisions that lead to people they know dying - friends, family, acquaintances. The tragic stories of regret.

The person who caused their grandmother’s death because they went to a party the night before. The parent who unknowingly transmitted the disease to their child, who then killed their kindergarten teacher. The 20-something who bent the rules just once to meet up with a Tinder match and ended up infecting an immune-suppressed relative.

As awful as these stories are, they could also be used as powerful tools in efforts to convince people to do the right thing, because we can much more easily see ourselves in them, especially if we are not old or in any other way physically vulnerable to COVID-19.

Artist Emmy Coletti was on the right track with her billboard mock up earlier this year:

Actual stories of regret might have found their way into the public discourse, but for the most part I haven’t seen them. The closest is the sad tale of the Skagit Valley Choral, an amateur choir group in the US State of Washington, which decided to go ahead with practice in early March. Despite taking great care to socially distance, the regular meet-up became a ‘super-spreader’ event that turned deadly.

From the LA Times article:

On March 6, Adam Burdick, the choir’s conductor, informed the 121 members in an email that amid the “stress and strain of concerns about the virus,” practice would proceed as scheduled at Mount Vernon Presbyterian Church.

“I’m planning on being there this Tuesday March 10, and hoping many of you will be, too,” he wrote.

Sixty singers showed up. A greeter offered hand sanitizer at the door, and members refrained from the usual hugs and handshakes.

Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.

After reading it, the strongest feeling was sympathy not only for the victims but also for Burdick, who thought he was doing the right thing and put precautions in place, but still organised a gathering that led to people dying. It’s a cautionary tale carrying a highly-relatable message that with COVID-19 you can never be too careful.

“It’s just normal random people doing things that they love to do, and all of a sudden some people are dead,” said Carolynn Comstock, one of the choir’s singers who contracted COVID-19 from the session. “It’s very sobering.”

Of course one of the main reasons we aren’t seeing these kinds of stories featured in Government ads is because most people who accidentally kill their grandmother or cause the deaths of their fellow chorist are reluctant to participate in a public campaign urging others to learn from their mistakes. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to find them.

I think these stories could be especially valuable in speaking to groups who are proving harder to convince than others. The numbers in our latest outbreak (and some of the anecdotal stories I’m hearing about a recent explosion in local sign ups to dating apps) seem to be showing that younger people are becoming increasingly hard to reach in public messaging around COVID-19, partly because they don’t consume traditional media and don’t think the virus will affect them.

On top of these challenges facing leaders and experts in trying to get people to do things that are often highly annoying and inconvenient for the greater good there is historically low trust in government and authority.

Last year the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, an international advocacy body that lobbies for political action to prepare for and mitigate the effects of global health emergencies, identified an erosion of public trust as one of the main barriers to effectively dealing with a global crisis like a pandemic.

“Governments, scientists, the media, public health, health systems and health workers in many countries are facing a breakdown in public trust that is threatening their ability to function effectively,” the Board wrote in their Annual Report last year.

A paper released this week by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace also explored the massive challenges faced by public health officials in communicating during the pandemic.

"Today’s digitally connected information space is an extremely challenging operating environment," write authors Victoria Smith and Alicia Wanless.

"Communicating the truth nowadays is a lot like hollering into a sprawling, open bazaar where some people might be straining to hear, but the vast majority are making noise and going about their own business. In this market, attention rather than valid information is the most valuable commodity."

I’m not suggesting that harnessing the power of real stories in public health campaigns is a magic bullet that fixes this and suddenly leads to total attention and compliance. But, equally, the old ways don’t seem to be working. Real stories featuring the experience of people can command attention and bridge the widening trust gap - because it’s much harder to deny their power than it is to dismiss directional, information-based messages from a political leader and traditional encouragement/chastisement framings.

Human stories should be only one part of the suite of communication tools being used to try and shift behavior. But, as we reach a dangerous phase of this battle for people’s commitment and attention, there’s a strong case for using them much more.

As hard as it is, we need to find the Vitor Godhinos and fatal Tinder dates (and the human stories of loss and regret that swirl around them) and tell them respectfully and well in order to better reach an increasingly tired and overwhelmed community.