Extrapolating from CDC data and Michael Hoerger’s Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative, we know that Pennsylvania experienced a “high” volume of COVID incidences, with around 1 in 35 people having active infections in early September 2024.
The Pitt—the new medical drama set on Friday, September 6, 2024, in the emergency department at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital—completely ignores this important reality. If the show were to mirror reality, especially since no one is wearing a mask (save for briefly during the rare surgical procedure), COVID would be spreading throughout the hospital. Yet, none of the patients in The Pitt have COVID. None of the patients are tested for COVID. None of the characters take any precautions to avoid being infected with COVID. None of the patients—or providers—ask about or show symptoms of Long COVID. There is no acknowledgment that COVID very much continues to re-infect, disable, and sometimes kill children and adults.
For a show that has rightly been praised for many of its realist depictions and for how it does challenge some medical misconceptions, such as those about the measles vaccine, this omission is a gaping gap. It’s irresponsible. It’s disrespectful. A parallel might be if a show purported to be about childhood cancer but never actually mentioned or included children.
The Pitt’s unethical narrative choices play directly into the widespread, potentially deadly misconception that the global pandemic has been over and that COVID is no longer a threat. Medical dramas can serve as important tools for starting conversations and lessons about the pandemic, as argued in an 2022 JAMA article. The Pitt, however, misses an opportunity and instead actively erases from existence one of the most important medical issues of our time.
COVID only gets acknowledgment through flashbacks in The Pitt. Unjust issues emerge here, too.
Dr. Michael Robinavitch (called “Dr. Robby” by most), a head emergency physician at Pittsburgh Trauma, is struggling because his mentor died exactly four years prior due to a COVID infection.
Difficult moments throughout that Friday trigger flashbacks for Dr. Robby. These flashbacks are all set in the hospital sometime in mid-2020, with providers running around in full personal protective equipment and with patients crowded together with breathing tubes coming from them. These scenes use muffled sound and a soft focus, creating a distant, dreamy feeling for audiences. The Pitt’s specific narrative use of the flashback firmly isolates all things COVID in the distant past, as something no longer a concern four years later—something that very much remains a concern.
The specific use of the flashback further isolates COVID not merely in the past but in the past of one individual’s memories. It opens the question of whether Dr. Robby’s memories are reliable. After all, memory can be faulty, even more so when connected to trauma.
Going by what the writers provide, The Pitt creates a world where only Dr. Robby has pandemic-related trauma. And since September 6 holds special meaning to him, the show structures his trauma as being less about COVID and more about a difficult time that coincides with COVID events.
The Pitt’s quasi-recognition of COVID carefully and deliberately minimizes the pandemic at every step. Like much in our society, history is rewritten to make a systemic issue an individual issue instead. Said differently, The Pitt takes an actual global calamity and reimagines it as little more than one individual’s very specific memory on one difficult day.
This is the opposite of realism. The opposite of ethical representation.
Including excess deaths, more than 40 million have died globally because of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2—the full name of what society has renamed COVID to lessen alarm. This novel, highly contagious virus is reinfecting people yearly. As with the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis, the long-term impacts of COVID remain to be seen; although we already know that Long COVID is making life difficult for millions. Trauma from the chaos spawned by COVID has wide-spread impacts, including for providers, especially when looking at the unusual uncertainty and universal urgency of the pandemic’s early days.
Cultural texts, including The Pitt, are important to study critically because they reflect and shape societal hopes and fears. Part of why The Pitt ignores COVID is certainly because audiences are—rightly—terrified of COVID and have long disliked conversations about or representations of COVID. An OpEd writer in 2022 was already saying, “I’m grateful that I’m having to deal less with the pandemic…on my television set.” The other side of this is that The Pitt will inevitably (re)shape how audiences will understand the 2020s and COVID, just as media consumption dictates how people understand important events like the Civil Rights Revolution.
I don’t fully dislike the show. I appreciate much that the fifteen episodes do, especially its representations of neurodiversity and of the forces that put the bottom line before patient care. As one critic puts it, The Pitt “tells a very clear story about the way that the infrastructure of health care routinely fails its practitioners and patients alike.” And I appreciate that seemingly all television dramas fall short and fail to fully recognize COVID.
Yet, given The Pitt’s popularity and all that it does well, meaningful inclusion of COVID stories could have helped raise awareness about this continued threat and maybe saved actual lives.
Andrew Joseph Pegoda, PhD (@AJP_PHD) holds a doctorate and two master’s degrees and is a Lecturer at the University of Houston.