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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

All news media is bad at reporting on science and medicine, but they've kicked it into an extra gear for this pandemic. I've seen endless articles pointing out the newest, barely-supported piece of evidence that might mean COVID-19 is even worse than we thought. And you never see the follow up article when that turns our to be pure BS. At one point a couple weeks back someone at the WHO said they don't know exactly how immunity works yet with this virus, which was followed by a flood of articles screaming about how we can't become immune (with a little "maybe" shoved in somewhere way below the headline).

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".

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> of evidence that might mean COVID-19 is even worse than we thought.

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...

At one point a couple weeks back someone at the WHO said they don't know exactly how immunity works yet with this virus, which was followed by a flood of articles screaming about how we can't become immune (with a little "maybe" shoved in somewhere way below the headline).

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.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/25/us/who-immunity-antibodies-co...

I mean, I don't respect CNN, but I'm sure some people do.

The CNN headline for the article you linked to is:

"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.

It's just poor communication, anybody who parrots 'evidence' to the average audience will know full well that 'no evidence' => 'evidence _against_ something'. That's a really, really basic way to mess up when communicating this. I don't know why it's so bad. I think this is certainly a case where an educated journalist should not simply consume literally the WHO's output, and should instead term it in ways commonly understood to be closer to the truth.

The final 3 paragraphs of the 9-paragraph CNN article are a quote from a non-WHO expert doctor on the subject of the article. It does look like they tried to contextualize it and not just literally repeat the WHO announcement.

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.

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