Do fear and the media help to make a horrible pandemic worse?

We humans believe we are responsibly scanning our environment for dangers — known as “risk assessment” — at times when we are being driven by fear, as I wrote in the book, “False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear,” in 2005. Fear is a deep emotion that circulates in what I call the hard-wiring of the brain — from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex; it causes you to release stress hormones even when the real danger is remote. It enables you to over-personalize your risk. Your heart pounds and your eyes’ pupils dilate, even when you are still safe.

The media dilates our fear, utilizing ratings-driving terms like “devastating,” “wildly contagious,” “deadly scourge” and “sweeping across the country,” as emerging contagions are instantly compared to the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed more than 50 million people worldwide. Politicians capitalize on our fears, too, so that they may look like capable leaders. Sometimes this attention helps us. In the case of today’s COVID-19 pandemic, the focus has been on how quickly our health care system has been overwhelmed in hot spots, especially New York City. Do our health care workers on the front lines have enough equipment? How many people are dying?

Unfortunately, since the heart of the pandemic has been taking place in New York City, the news media’s nerve center, it is all too easy for a cable TV viewer or internet surfer or social media addict to forget that there are hundreds of rural counties in this country which haven’t seen a single case.

And this applies not only to rural areas. Let’s take Palm Beach County, Fla., for example, where 1.5 million people live. There have been 3,130 confirmed cases of COVID-19 there, but the numbers have been falling dramatically. Meanwhile, the beaches are still roped off, so people are walking, jogging, and biking on the sidewalk by the beach. There is definitely a way to open the beaches and still practice social distancing; people could bring water and hand sanitizer, and plan on short visits because the bathrooms are still either closed or unsanitary.

Suggesting limited beach openings in areas where the numbers are dropping is not irresponsible, is not the same thing as saying that the problem isn’t real. The virus is highly contagious; we have no immunity to it and, especially for those in high-risk groups (the elderly, the obese, those with diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, emphysema or cancer), the impact of the virus can be devastating in terms of inflammation and blood clots in the lungs, heart, brain, kidneys and blood vessels throughout the body.

It turns out that it is far easier to put a public health problem into context when it hasn’t come on so rapidly or killed so many thousands of people. Since a large percentage of cases are asymptomatic, the real death rate is, of course, far lower than has been reported. Still, any attempt to question the constant drum-beat about the draconian measures reportedly needed to combat a dangerous threat is instantly met with derision and marginalization.

Any attempt to point to the collateral damage in terms of our mental, physical and economic health as a result of the system-wide lockdowns is too easily dismissed as being unorthodox or not paying sufficient attention — almost reverence — to the problem at hand. There is a kind of religious dogma to insisting that any dissent is automatically disrespecting the virus.

Ironic, isn’t it? When the very health vulnerabilities that we create by self-imposed overeating, little exercise and high-stress lives leave us vulnerable to the ravages of the very pandemic virus of which we are most afraid. 

Dr. Nicole Saphier has just published an insightful new book, “Make America Healthy Again,” which focuses on “what happens when a huge swath of society decides their health is someone else’s problem.” She describes how medical innovation, “the source of our greatest strength … has become our greatest weakness. We are looking to experts to solve our problems with pills and superfoods and surgeries. As a nation, we are getting unhealthier and hoping doctors will save us.”

The solution, as Dr. Saphier says, is not to blame others for our problems and not to yearn for the days of instant gratification and coddling, but to learn a new way forward, one distinct from “the ‘obesogenic’ environment of processed and fast food.”

Now is the time to exercise more, to eat better and to sleep more restfully. It not only will help us to stave off complications of the dreaded virus if we get it, but it also is the way forward to a healthier future.

Marc Siegel, M.D., is a professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health. He is a Fox News medical correspondent.