The US reached a terrible and wretched “milestone” as the media and new president announced passing 500,000 deaths attributed to Covid-19. And yet while there was so much else that could have been said by the media, and by Joe Biden, beyond the bleedingly obvious that it is an awful and heart-breaking milestone, almost none of them did. They just carried on pummelling everyone with the number.

The media has stuck with reporting blunt, emotional and sensational angles throughout the pandemic

In other words: they launched a full-scale assault of pity porn, that over-the-top version of yanking your heart strings. It dominates the social media space nowadays, and it increasingly inhabits mainstream media and politics. As with sexual pornography, pity porn takes natural human needs and twists them into a darker and solipsistic force. One of the main problems with pity porn is that it allows people on both sides of the social contract—the populace and the politicians—to escape responsibility for institutional, structural and social problems that remain entrenched. Accountability is lost in the emotional smoke screen as our minds turn to mush.

“Adolf Hitler realised that softmindedness was so prevalent among his followers that he said, ‘I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few’”, said Martin Luther King in his wonderful treatise A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart. King highlighted how in Mein Kampf Hitler asserted: “By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell—and hell, heaven … The greater the lie, the more readily will it believed.”

That could be unpacked in so many ways in relation to Covid-19. But in keeping the focus on the media’s reaction to 500,000 US deaths, the trite headlines and lack of deep analysis is emblematic of so much of the media’s myopic coverage of the pandemic.

Rather than asking tough, awkward questions, or daring to probe beyond safe and simple narratives—such as it’s all Donald Trump’s fault—the media has stuck with reporting blunt, emotional and sensational angles. There is a glimmer of hope that finally we might be getting a more nuanced appraisal given the ongoing probe into New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic—the media last year gushingly contrasting Cuomo’s apparent steadfast leadership style with the absence of it from Trump—and his policy of moving Covid-19 patients into care homes and then misrepresenting the resulting number of deaths. In the UK, too, a more nuanced pushback and exploration of Covid-19 narratives has The Critic’s voice feeling less solitary these days, joined by the likes of non-mainstream media outlets such as UnHerd, Quillette and Spiked.

The unwillingness to discuss weight vis-à-vis Covid-19 could be proving deadly

The US’s predicament is a particularly revealing case regarding Covid-19 narratives in light of a recent Sunday Times column by Matthew Syed, which focused on the negative consequences of a dearth of personal responsibility in modern society. Syed focused on the taking of a new drug to tackle obesity rather than people dealing with it through sweat and will power. It was a bold example, especially given how it’s increasingly difficult to talk candidly about weight issues and the related intersection of health problems and personal responsibility. This unwillingness to discuss weight vis-à-vis Covid-19 could be proving deadly, given studies continue to indicate that being overweight makes you more vulnerable to the disease.

“Systematic reviews and meta-analyses overwhelmingly show that obesity is associated both with a higher risk for intensive care unit (ICU) admission and poorer outcomes for Covid-19”, says the World Obesity Federation. It notes a 2020 report from Italy that indicates 99 per cent of Covid-19 deaths involved patients with pre-existing conditions, including those that are commonly seen in people with obesity, such as hypertension, cancer, diabetes and heart diseases. There are plenty of other telling examples and reports. Perhaps the World Obesity Federation is run by skinny people who have an outlandish revulsion at the sight of fat people and are out to make an unfair point. Or maybe, as ever, Occam’s razor rules: the simplest explanation is the most likely one. What has always been the case before also applies with Covid-19: being overweight/in a state of diminished fitness can cause additional health problems or make you more susceptible to the virus.

Boris Johnson briefly tried to address the weight issue last July. But it fizzled out, presumably because of predictable finger wagging about it being nasty and unfair—one could argue that it is nasty and unfair to let people get into that condition and stay there with no help—or because the behavioural scientists in government vetoed it. Now it seems firmly off the cards for discussion, even when America (with its well documented obesity problem) ploughs through the 500,000-deaths mark.

The lack of coverage quite possibly has resulted in more people dying than need have

This relationship is not being discussed to a weird degree—the lack of coverage quite possibly has resulted (and will result) in more people dying than need have, had there been a stronger and more sustained message about the additional risks of Covid-19 for overweight people, rather than, say, just going on about masks all the time—may be one of the reasons why the UK’s BAME population appears to have been more badly impacted by Covid-19. As in America, people lower down the socio-economic ladder, among various factors that make them prone to becoming overweight, often eat worse because healthy food is more expensive than the heavily processed food that poorer people have to survive on.

Numerous minority ethnic groups in the US and UK “live with a greater burden of obesity and other chronic diseases”, says the International Journal of Obesity. “Obesity rates are significantly higher among Hispanic and African Americans, as well as [among] black, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani groups in the UK, than their white counterparts. The overlap of Covid-19 risk signals between obesity and ethnicity therefore is of consequence.”

According to the journal, the most comprehensive epidemiology on ethnicity and Covid-19 currently available is from the UK. BAME individuals—who represent about 14 per cent of the UK population—comprise over 30 per cent of hospitalised patients with Covid-19. It notes that the Office for National Statistics highlights stark ethnic disproportionalities in Covid-19 mortality odds, over four- and threefold for black and Bangladeshi/Pakistani individuals, respectively, compared to white individuals. The first ten UK physicians to die from Covid-19 were all of BAME background.

“Ethnic differences in economic status, underlying health conditions, density of residence, and household crowding all contribute to the unequal impact of Covid-19”, the journal notes.

But there’s no exploration of that from the media. Instead, all the media do is leverage BAME suffering and the inequities, using it to furnish attention-grabbing headlines while playing the pity card, and then say nothing more about what could be done to address those predicaments. Which is precisely the problem: there is so much that could be said, but it is shut down. As the recent Quillette article Lockdown Scepticism Was Never a “Fringe” Viewpoint noted, “politicians, experts, and social-media companies” have gone to great efforts to “paint [lockdown] dissent as marginal or even dangerous”.

In a similar way, there’s little discussion about how all the things that would actually boost your immune system and gird it to stand a better chance if you get Covid-19—eating well, not drinking too much alcohol, sleeping properly, exercise, endorphin-inducing camaraderie, etc.—have been blitzed by lockdowns. Of course, discussing all that would be far too pragmatic and inconvenient.

So, instead, when it came to a solution for Covid-19, the greatest minds on our planet came up with the drama of locking down and wearing masks, supported by industrial-scale emotional blackmail and an abundance of useless pity porn in the absence of constructive guidance. People are not blind to this; the public is not as stupid and gullible as the governments and scientists seem to believe. And people’s awareness of these contradictions in open sight can lead to a cognitive dissonance that has a hugely debilitating effect on humans and their morale.

Eventually, all of this can lead you to crumble, as I learned during my tour in Afghanistan. Both asymmetric warfare and viral behaviour—which is asymmetric by default—is not defeated by rigid unwieldly tactics, and certainly not by trying the same thing repeatedly. I am sure some wise man out there once said something about doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results being the definition of madness.

All the pity is a waste of time and energy unless you channel it

I write all this as someone you might call a recovering pityoholic, and who knows pity porn far too intimately, following ample navel gazing and soul searching about my military service in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. After all the self-help books I have read— and the aid of mental health charities like Combat Stress and the Transition, Intervention and Liaison Service (TILS) run by the NHS—I can vouch that almost all the advice from whatever source boils down to something rather simple (and perhaps obvious). Ultimately, all the emotion and pity is basically a waste of time and energy unless you channel it, or build from it, toward more solid and constructive life-enhancing actions.

For sure, those actions are hard to divine and even harder to enact, taking physical effort, mental agility, enormous patience and all the rest. It’s often much easier to embrace the pity. Don’t analyse or try to parse it; just wail, hug and rock yourself to sleep as another terrible milestone is reached.