The COVID-19 pandemic reached staggering new peaks during an ongoing global resurgence at the end of 2020. Although public health guidelines initially helped to slow the spread of disease, widespread pandemic fatigue and prolonged harm to financial stability and mental wellbeing have contributed to this resurgence. In this late stage of the pandemic, it is clear that new interventions are needed to support long-term behavior change. Here, we examined subjective perceived risk about COVID-19, and the relationship between perceived risk and engagement in risky behaviors. In Study 1 (N = 303), we found that subjective perceived risk is inaccurate but predicts compliance with public health guidelines. In Study 2 (N = 760), we developed a multi-faceted intervention designed to realign perceived risk with actual risk. Participants completed one of three variants of an episodic simulation task; we expected that imagining a COVID-related scenario would increase the salience of risk information and enhance behavior change. Immediately following the episodic simulation, participants completed a risk estimation task with personalized feedback about local risk levels. We found that information prediction error, a measure of surprise, drove beneficial change in perceived risk and willingness to engage in risky activities. Imagining a COVID-related scenario beforehand enhanced the effect of prediction error on learning. Importantly, our intervention produced lasting effects that persisted after a 1-3 week delay. Overall, we describe a fast and feasible online intervention that effectively changed beliefs and intentions about risky behaviors.