Of course 'long' in Dutch is a lung, and so a lot of people have simply assumed that this name refers to a version of Covid having a specific long-term effect only on the lungs. Like a so-called 'head cold' or the popular 'stomach flu'. And it's not a small number. It's completely understandable because you think in your own language first, not a foreign language. Increasingly though, here in NL especially, there's a tendency for the media to just adopt the English for things deemed to be of an 'international' nature. So when 'lockdowns' were put in place for Covid and the French press was talking about 'confinement' and Germany's about 'Abriegelungen', the Dutch were going about saying 'lockdown' this and 'lockdown' that in a heavily accented way. On the door of a shop at the time I saw a hand-written sign with:
Gesloten wegens luckdown'
This might be a Dutch thing in some ways, where people have an eagerness to adopt English phraseology and often misinterpret it. It's not only English though. For some reason 'inenting' (vaccination/inoculation) has been entirely superseded by 'vaccineren'. And evidently the word 'vaccin' came into Dutch from French, though a long while ago, because the word is said with an approximate French accent. Though you also hear 'vaccine' as 'vaccin-uh'. However I remember being at the hospital back in 2000 and the nurse asking if I was 'ingeënt tegen polio?' (inoculated against Polio). Whizz forward to now and when I joined the new doctor's practice near where I moved, the question became: 'ben je gevaccineerd tegen Polio?'
That last one is a separate issue perhaps, though over the years I've come across so many pop English phrases and then seen how they are completely misused or that they were floating about in the media and were misunderstood by sections of the public. And that in fact they were unnecessary, because there are perfectly good Dutch words which would cause no-one to be confused about anything. It's pretty silly.