I don't watch "The Pitt", but
this is a very powerful opinion piece on what's missing from the TV show when it comes to the COVID pandemic, what horror our hospitals, doctors and nurses actually had to cope with -- and how many deaths could have been prevented.
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From STAT 1-18-26:
What lingers in ‘The Pitt’ is heartache. What’s missing is outrage
The virus was lethal, but the scale of physicians’ and other health care workers’ despair was built by people
By Jennifer W. Tsai, an emergency medicine physician, writer, and educator in Oakland, California.
"In “The Pitt,” Robby is the rockstar every emergency doctor wants to
be — sharp, fast, instinctive. So it’s shocking when the man who moves
like lightning through a resus room
buckles to the floor, sobbing, gasping. He’s having a flashback: the
ICU, a dying then dead mentor he couldn’t save, the pandemic returning
in cruel cinematic shards.
"This is how Covid appears in the show: not as a sequence of policy
failures or manufactured crisis, but as personal memories that threaten
to pull a good-but-broken doctor out of the room when his patients need
him most. There are no scenes of shortages negotiated in back rooms, no
elected officials delaying action, no agencies hollowed out before the
virus arrived. We see the web, but never the spider.
“The Pitt” is the closest mainstream culture has come to
acknowledging the wreckage of frontline medicine during Covid. But by
focusing the camera on Robby’s anguish instead of the systems that made
it inevitable, it mirrors how the country has chosen to remember the
pandemic: as a sad misfortune that happened, rather than a moral failure
that was done.
"But Covid was not only a tragedy. It was a betrayal. How we remember matters.
"I trained to be an emergency physician in the crucible of Covid.
"It was unspeakable.
"It was screaming anguish when you told a mother her daughter was dead across a fragile phone call and apologized: No—even though she was outside in the hospital parking lot, she couldn’t come in, would never see her child warm again.
"It was trying to hold the gaze of wide, darting eyes while begging
for understanding when we ran out of sedatives to keep plastic-choked
patients comfortable on the ventilator.
"It was witnessing entire families collect in the corners of the
department, knowing only one in 10 would wake up to face a crushing new
loneliness.
"It was sobbing in stairwells trying not to soil your precious mask with snot.
"It was lifeless facedown bodies we had to flip like pancakes twice a day.
"It was no respite, no hope, it was terror at the despair and then the horror of your own numbness as time marched on.
"I know Dr. Robby’s pain. Imagine being built to care for five and
handed 20 — then sent home night after night carrying the deaths of 15
as if they were your fault. The grief and guilt annihilated our worth.
The deaths we oversaw were so lonely, so terrible and stripped of
dignity that the violence of their abandonment demeaned the humanity of
everyone left alive. We had few certainties: only that this was killing
us, and that we had to show up anyway. We were dying. I don’t know how
else to say it. We were dying.
"I used to think the horror — the pain, the exhaustion, the sheer
volume of death — was the core injury of Covid. That version of harm
survives most easily, and one our culture and “The Pitt” know how to
hold.
"But the deeper wound — the one the show can’t quite name — is that
the suffering was not inevitable, but tolerated; shaped, stretched, and
sanctioned by decisions made far from the bedside.
"The question is not why Robbie is sad. It’s why he was left in a
gutted hospital, without PPE, no staff to help turn dying patients, no
space to put the bodies or give his mentor the death he deserved. The
better question why he — and all of us — were abandoned to this fate.
"The day before the Washington Post warned “Covid-19 hits doctors, nurses, and EMTs, threatening health system,” photos showed Mayor Bill De Blasio hitting a Brooklyn YMCA
in defiance of his own city’s lockdown. The Kardashians and other
ring-light aristocracy passed around asymptomatic tests like hors
d’ouvres for parties while frontline clinicians — going toe-to-toe with
the virus and terrified of turning their children into their next
patients — were informed there simply weren’t tests to spare. Faced with
ventilator shortages numbering in the tens of thousands, we swallowed
the bile of becoming allocators of life and death.
"Estimates suggest that if the U.S. had responded with the speed and coordination of East Asian counterparts, more than 400,000 lives
could have been saved in the first months alone. If distancing policies
had begun just one week earlier — March 8 instead of March 15 — tens of thousands of Americans may have lived.
"The virus was lethal, but the scale of our despair was built.
"By the time Covid arrived, the country had already dismantled its
defenses. The White House’s global health security office was gone. Tens
of thousands of public health jobs axed. Regulatory gridlock and
defective CDC tests stalled surveillance, allowing the contagion to
spread unchecked for six crucial weeks. Leaders waited — then waited —
to issue basic shelter-in-place orders while bodies stacked up in
refrigerated trucks.
"Inside hospitals, years of cost-cutting left wards brittle, supply
chains thin, and no margin for surge. “The Pitt”nods to staffing cuts
and closed floors, but stops short oftracing the profit-over-patients
model to the pandemic body count it produced.
"Outside the hospital, as disinformation metastasized into contempt,
my coworkers and I faced accusations of conspiracy, ambulance bay
assaults, and derision that we had to hold alongside our exhaustion, our
panic, our sick and dying friends. The consequences were not abstract. Excess mortality bloomed in Republican counties and communities saturated with denialist media. Hundreds of thousands of lives were forfeit to vaccine refusal alone.
"To say my colleagues and I were broken by overwork and sorrow is to
accept a cover story that erases the decisions that made mass death
predictable and prolonged. The terrible verdict of the pandemic was that
our flaying was a tolerable inconvenience; that a million sodden,
lonely deaths were an acceptable price for power. We were broken by
choice, not chance.
"This is the story “The Pitt”stops short of telling. The effect is a
cinematic passive voice that feeds our cultural memory. As in
post-Vietnam Hollywood, state-engineered catastrophe is repackaged as
catharsis — an aesthetic solution that reliably displaces indictment.
Covid becomes an unavoidable tragedy that left some people traumatized,
rather than a preventable mass death. What lingers in “The Pitt” is
heartache. What’s missing is outrage. Instead of accountability, we get
anesthesia. Let’s just get Robbie therapy so he can get back to work.
"The spiders that scripted our nightmare benefit from this willful
amnesia. And the biggest harm is simple: the machinery that decided who
was expendable in the pandemic keeps humming offscreen.
"The pandemic didn’t just end. It was buried alive.As the story of
Covid hardens around “unprecedented times” instead of unprecedented
negligence, the same governing philosophy that hollowed us out during
Covid — delay, disinvestment, and contempt for collective care — grinds
on.
"Hospitals that held the line for the poorest and sickest — pushed
past their brink by the pandemic — have closed at disproportionate
rates, leaving entire regions with deeper vacuums of care. Medicaid is
being eviscerated. Since April 2023, more than 25 million people have lost coverage, losses projected to cause more than 40,000 preventable deaths each year. This is a toll we’ll tally in bodies, wheelchairs, funerals, and empty kitchen tables.
“The Pitt”shows us some of the consequence: ERs are more crowded than
ever, flooded with patients boarding in hallways and dying in waiting
rooms. We’re running a far less resilient healthcare system with even
less slack than we had before.
"In the early onslaught of the pandemic, I paused between patients to
sign a petition to urge Trump from cutting CDC funds by 10%. Five years
later, leaders proposed slashing the agency’s budget by half. More than half our states passed laws making it harder for health officials to require masks, quarantines, or vaccinations. The result is visible: Core surveillance systems have been eliminated and the U.S. is facing its worst measles outbreak in three decades. This is a spillover of pandemic destruction that’s coming for our kids.
"If Covid was a fire alarm, our response, incredibly, has been to rip
out the wiring. Instead of correcting the underbuilt public health
systems that allowed thousands to die in the dark, we are choosing to
institutionalize blindness. This is not erosion by neglect. It is
continuity by design.
"When I finished emergency medicine residency, after the most
harrowing months of my life, I found I couldn’t explain or understand
what had happened. There was only the sense that something had lodged
inside me and refused to move. I had been 26 when I started my training,
but felt much older as I drove, crossing the country with a box of used
masks I could not bear to throw away.
"I am hungry, so hungry, for some depiction of my life that tells the
truth. That what was done to us was not just unbearable, but wrong.
"Covid revealed a system that worked exactly as designed. When care is
treated as conditional, preventable death becomes not a failure, but an
accepted cost of doing business. What we choose to remember about the
pandemic will decide if that logic survives.
“The Pitt” is a television drama, not a public inquiry. But in a
country that has offered little else — no national reckoning, no
memorials, no shared language sturdy enough to hold what we lived
through — its reach carries extra weight. With millions of viewers, it
will have tremendous power in deciding if grief is where the story of
the pandemic ends.
"If Season 2 of “The Pitt” dares to use the vaunt of storytelling not
to soothe us, but to force a reckoning with what was chosen and who paid
for it, it will have done something rare — and necessary.
"We don’t need another tale about the sadness of our wreckage. We need accounts brave enough to name who built it."
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