An analysis of people who were hospitalised with covid-19 in the first wave of the pandemic has revealed that the ongoing decline in their cognitive abilities is the equivalent to losing 10 IQ points
The cognitive abilities of people who were hospitalised with covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic remain lower than expected, even years later, and there is some evidence that this is forcing them to change jobs.
“What we found is that the average cognitive deficit was equivalent to 10 IQ points, based on what would be expected for their age, et cetera,” says Maxime Taquet at the University of Oxford.
Long covid sufferer here, my video game skills have taken a hard drop in the last year, and I’m fucking terrified honestly.
Not just action, but cognitive games as well.
FUCK
Guys, he doesn’t know about the resurgence of boardgames and that we’re in a boardgaming golden age!
this is actually handy; i can blame long covid for all my fuckups from now on
TADA! I think I read somewhere that Covid affects the brain akin to dimentia or something like that. I don’t remember the science behind it, and it was just the beginnings of the findings and I am sure that things are clearer now (a couple of years after I had read that). But I have had Covid an uncomfortable amount of times. My gal was one of the first to bring it home in the US as far as I heard it. Everyone where she was working just kept coming down with this “nasty cold” or somethingerother. They literally threw us into isolation shortly after. But I remember moments when we were just laying together in bed, sleeping our asses off and I would think “are we breathing? Am I breathing?” But I think it scrambled our brains like eggs. And we got through it. I think we came back pretty well the first time. The second time, we did alright. Still nothing long-term that seemed to be terribly messed up. By the third, I think my thoughts just decided to leave the building. I still forget whole words. They just vanish. And I get to play the world’s worst guessing game. And it never got better, and at first it really upset me but now I have a real “It is what it is” kinda vibe to it, because I can’t seemingly change it soooooo…
The forgetting words thing is awful. Thank god for ChatGPT or else I would never be able to remember them.
Hey, I never thought about that. I just stumble and toss our a bunch of words that I can think of that are akin to xyz and then have others become my breathing thesaurus until we arrive that that word that means __ that starts with an m. It’s actually kindaaa fun in a way, because we get to problem solve as a micro-unit for two seconds and as someone who’s truly, truly, truly spastic it’s a nice little brain-break/aside.
The tag line on this with regards to IQ is very misleading. Setting aside that IQ is a terrible form of measurement and no weight should be given to it, the study actually reveals that measured IQ is unchanged. They measured after discharge, and then several years later with no change. With no pre-covid measurement, this is a more than useless bit of data.
Depression and anxiety are increased, but so did that of the general population. So hard to tie any of that to COVID or long COVID.
IQ tests seem like they would actually be useful here though had they done pre-Covid tests and at least a couple of them. I’m not an expert but it seems like the thing they’re bad at is quantifying in specific amounts the intelligence of a person.
For instance, we can’t say that if someone’s IQ went from 100 down to 80 that they became 20% less intelligent. But we can maybe say that this suggests that they lost some cognitive ability and then we can characterize that against a population without long Covid. And again we couldn’t say they’re 20% worse than someone without long Covid, but we certainly know that losing 20 points on an IQ test isn’t normal.
Don’t know what’s doing it, the COVID or chain smoking thc from 5-11 every evening
Honestly, I feel like it has affected me cognitively and I was 3 vaccines in when I got it.
Same, but I think it is more the stress of finding out just how many people are absolutely trash over the last decade with antivaxxers crushing my last respect for humanity.
I thought I had a pretty low opinion of humanity before the pandemic hit. Oh boy, was I wrong.
