THINK LIKE A SCIENCE JOURNALIST:

I’ve been having many discussions recently about journalism and science journalism in this pandemic. One of my main points: Context is king, caveats are central.
Few stories illustrate that as clearly as today’s news of a #SARSCov2 re-infection.

The news itself seems simple: Scientists finally have good evidence that someone has been infected twice with the virus that causes #covid19:
One man, two infections. Simple story.
But what does it mean?

You can take the view, as @K_G_Andersen does that there is basically nothing to be learnt from this story of one man and his two infections. https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1298021309276925953

But there is a ton of science journalism to be done and it is almost pure context and caveats.

Some caveats first: This is one case out of more than 23 million reported #sarscov2 infections. Nothing in biology is 100% and if you have a sufficiently high number of events even rare things will crop up. That is an important concept we can explain to readers/viewers/listeners.

Another caveat: There’s a lot we don’t know here. For instance: Was the man actually infectious the second time? Was he shedding infectious virus? Scientists are still trying to figure that out, trying to culture live virus from his samples.

Context: How surprising would it be to have some people be re-infected? Not very, it turns out. “I think most virologists were waiting for this to happen and it was more of a question of when rather than if,” @DrCJ_Houldcroft told me.

Why? “It’s almost impossible to be protected completely from a reinfection, especially [with] upper respiratory tract viruses and bacteria,” @MarkSlifka told me. “We get reinfected all the time.”

Context: One of the authors of the study told me his conclusion was: “This case proves that at least some patients do not have life-long immunity.” @MarkSlifka thinks the opposite: The first infection protected the patient the 2nd time. Not from infection, but from disease!