The battle between awareness of the COVID-19’s severe consequences and fatigue from nine months of pandemic precautions shows up in the oddly shaped case, hospitalization, and fatality-count graphs, a new study suggests. The tension between awareness and fatigue can lead to case-count plateaus, shoulder-like dynamics, and oscillations as rising numbers of deaths cause people to become more cautious before they let down their guard to engage once again in behaviors that increase risk for transmission, which, in turn, leads to rising death counts—and renewed awareness. “Human behavior is complicated.” “Epidemics don’t necessarily have a single peak after which the risk subsides,” says Joshua Weitz, professor of biological sciences and founding director of the Interdisciplinary PhD in Quantitative Biosciences at Georgia Institute of Technology. “People’s behaviors are both influenced by and influence epidemic dynamics, potentially driving plateaus, and oscillations in incidence.”