As a scientist I say sometimes that one of the unnoticed victims of SARS-CoV-2 is media reporting. Some newspapers here (Italy) really love gruesome details, to be honest, but they conveniently forget talking about the frequency of said details.
I mean, if you have a respiratory disease that can blow your head off (this is just an absurd example), you prepare differently depending if it happens in 50% of the cases or in 0.5%. This is completely lost in news reporting.
In addition, the news (but sadly, some experts too!) treat SARS-CoV-2 as a magic virus that does everything different from any other known biological entity. While I was initially surprised to hear those cases of meningitis, I then found in the literature that other coronaviruses can infect the central nervous system (e.g. [1]).
It doesn't mean this complication less severe, when it occurs. But it's not a feature of this virus alone.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2018.0038...
Care to share a link or two? I’m skeptical that any respected news outlets reported that we can’t become immune.
Agreed on local TV news though; it’s a cesspool.
I mean, I don't respect CNN, but I'm sure some people do.
"WHO says no evidence shows that having coronavirus prevents a second infection"
The second paragraph of the article literally quotes a published brief from WHO:
"There is no evidence yet that people who have had Covid-19 will not get a second infection," WHO said in a scientific brief published Friday.
The headline is literally taken from the WHO's actual words. There's a case to be made that these sort of articles need to be more deeply contextualized with respect to how science works and what the implications of findings are (and what they aren't), but that gets into deeper questions about scientific literacy -- not just for journalists, but for their audience -- but it's hard to point at this and say that this reporting is making it look like the WHO was saying something that they weren't.
I would put more blame on the WHO for this than CNN in any case. It’s fair to say the way the WHO reported this was misunderstood, but the WHO themselves tweeted the same type of wording out directly on Twitter.
And have you ever watched local television news? Millions of Americans do every night. It's the worst of the worst, and their over-the-top tactics are a well worn joke. "Is your refrigerator going to kill you and your children? Tune in at eleven to find out, only on FUTV News".