By John Mandrola, Andrew Foy, and Vinay Prasad May 14, 2021Reprints Adobe After a year of frightening headlines, widespread concern, and countless retweets that the virus that causes Covid-19 may attack the heart more aggressively than any other viral illness, the verdict is in: It doesn’t. A report published last week in the journal JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging made that verdict blatantly clear. It’s time to set the record straight on Covid-19 and the heart, and to consider the lessons for how science is communicated to the public. advertisement The concern emerges An early report that set in motion fears of a Covid-heart disease connection was published in JAMA Cardiology on July 27, 2020. German researchers claimed that 78% of recently recovered Covid-19 patients had “abnormal” signs on their cardiac magnetic resonance scans and 60% showed signs of inflamed heart muscle, a condition known as myocarditis. Those astonishing numbers were covered in nearly 400 news outlets. The report has so far received been viewed more than 900,000 times — a rarity for academic papers.