I'd almost rather it not be reported on since it will only diminish, not enhance, most people's understanding of the virus.
The same can be said for reinfections and perhaps even long-term effects. The narrative surrounding these concepts is so common that I hear it from friends as if it were common knowledge. I don't know about the long-term effects but I am pretty certain that reinfections are very rare. But the prevalence of either seems to be omitted from the story.
Of course we don't know because the news often reports anecdotes when there is no data or even when there is data. The news isn't held to the standard of giving a whole picture, just a glimpse of the current moment. In that they find a lot of wiggle room to publish things that are in the "public interest" while also benefiting from sensationalism.
There are 4 endemic coronavirus strains that circulate through out the community. Immunity to those is hypothesized to be a 1 year time frame. Covid19 is probably going to be similar. The game changer is the vaccine which may cause a more durable and longer term immune response.
Mechanistically reinfection is possible even with a vaccine but you may be asymptomatic or the disease course may be innocuous and the infectious period reduced. This is what reduces the Ro value below 1.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
From all people who were tested in the study (a lot, order of 40000) around 2 percent were infected during the study. Remember that as the base infection rate during the study.
At the same time, around 370 were PCR positive at the start of the study. But during the study, of these 370, 3 were reinfected. It's not far from 1% of those. Now, as the infection rate of those not positive at the start (which we can consider "control") was around 2%, it seems that the chance to be reinfected could be as high as 50% during just the months the study was ongoing!
Please don't consider the estimated numbers as too exact, I don't believe there are much significant digits for conclusion, but I believe they represent the right order of magnitude when based on that many subjects and the randomness of the process, and the only conclusion that could follow is: naturally infected could be only weakly protected from the reinfection only months later. The quote from the study:
"A small proportion of participants were seropositive at baseline (138 [1·3%] of 10 673 in the UK and 235 [2·3%] of 10 002 in Brazil). Three participants seropositive at baseline had subsequent NAAT-positive swabs. One participant had an asymptomatic infection 3 weeks after a first dose of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. Two other participants in the control group had symptomatic infections 8 weeks and 21 weeks after their baseline sample was taken."
That's for me a kind-of proof that the reinfections aren't rare at all. Even more interesting, 2 of 3 were symptomatic, and the reinfections happened quite soon.
The reason it's not more known is only because most of reinfections just aren't tracked in careful studies like this one. Initially, the cases of reinfections weren't dismissed for lacking the "definitive" proof. An sure, most of the tests are just PCR, but there were a few studies where the sequencing was performed (much rarer and more expensive and time consuming procedure) and where it was possible to prove that the detected virus in the reinfection didn't have the same genetic fingerprint as the initial one.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Then you quoted from the paper: ... small proportion of participants were seropositive ...
Which is in direct conflict. The latter is saying they had positive antibody tests. Not PCR tests. In fact a lot of those were most likely just false positives, from a antibody test that "only" had a 99% specificity. Which is most of them.
The quote you requoted only partially lacked the end: "at baseline": "A small proportion of participants were seropositive at baseline" which doesn't say anything about the reinfection.
It's also surely not antibody test, NAAT mentioned is "nucleic acid amplification test" a test that tests for the presence of virus' RNA, not antibodies. Also: false positive while symptomatic is significantly less probable than just the probability of false positive.
If your point is that you don't believe they were seropositive at all at baseline, fine, that's can be said, it would be possible, and that is surely not 100% sure.
The point is still, there's no proof that the reinfections are "rare." And from what is known about another human coronaviruses reinfections do occur each year.
Edit, answer to below: yes, I tried to understand what you say, the last two paragraphs I wrote after I wrote the start. The NAAT is the only test procedure mentioned in the same quote where you took only the first few words. I do admit wrongly remembering the nature of the test at the baseline. It has sense as it would be less probable to have somebody participating in the study at the time when he should be in isolation.
And I don't understand why you're pulling in the NAAT test from that quote. It is how the three people tested positive later, after being infected. It is not about the 370 people who were seropositive at the baseline.
There's really nothing to be done to prevent this except to note how important it is to consider all of the associated information, and present its context.
You'll never control how the information is processed by each receiving party, and nor should you.
It's good to have this information—it's good to let people know that there is always the potential for something similar, or worse, to arise.
Similar to knowing your entire house might be wiped out [by a major storm] someday if you move to Florida—which wouldn't surprise anyone anymore. Repeated dispersal of the information will help prevent rampant hysteria... once a semblance of understanding and context is normalized.
Facts will get out. You say "the media" as if each outlet is the same, but that's not the case - both responsible sources and conspiracy theorists (among other types of reporters) are represented among "the media". If you want people to have a better understanding of this, it's better that responsible sources get ahead of misinformation.
But much of the rest of the media will have a field day with this.
Until that happens, isn't blanket-labelling them a guilty party a little premature?