Last week the media in the uk ran headlines saying that covid was spreading like wildfire, despite the evidence from the number of cases showing the opposite (halving every 2 weeks)

The day later they ran headlines sayign that covid wasn't spreading like wildfire.

The source of the first scaremongering inaccurate dangerous headline was a study which said:

  During the period 6 January to 15 January, SARS-CoV-2 virus was circulating with a higher prevalence than between 25 November to 3 December with 158 in 10,000 infected. There was no strong evidence for either growth or decay in prevalence averaged across the period 6 January to 15 January.

Which led to headlines like

"Covid-19 cases have increased more quickly since lockdown started in England, study finds"

(Lockdown started on Jan 5th - when about 60,000 cases were being identified each day. The headline was Jan 21st, when about 30,000 cases were identified)

https://inews.co.uk/news/covid-19-cases-england-increase-sin...

The 7 day cases identified from Jan 6th to 15th dropped from 55,885/day to 40,242/day

That either means the number of unidentified cases balooned, or the REACT study was too small to identify changes over the course of a week (it's not designed to). In the former case we'd expect fewer tests were being done, but tests throughout January have remained averaging about 550,000 a day.

The media will print whatever they can, so it's important to give headlines which make it clear the data is inconclusive. "appears" is a weasel-word that is well used in this case, and far better than misreporting a scientific paper