Today in Wear Your F$#@ing Mask

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that Covid infections result in significant and long lasting mental impairments.

So it's not you imagination when you think that people have gotten dummer post pandemic:

Abstract

BACKGROUND

Cognitive symptoms after coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), the disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), are well-recognized. Whether objectively measurable cognitive deficits exist and how long they persist are unclear.

.......

SECONDARY ANALYSES

In analyses of individual tasks on the cognitive battery, we observed associations similar to those of the primary regression model, both among the 102,263 participants who completed all the tasks (excluding those within 12 weeks after infection onset) and among the 141,583 participants who completed at least one task. Memory, reasoning, and executive function (i.e., planning) tasks were the most sensitive and had the largest deficits in the group with unresolved persistent symptoms as compared with the no–Covid-19 group (−0.33 to −0.20 SD) (Table S14A and S14B). This pattern was similar with regard to hospitalization but was disproportionately greater for visuospatial deficits (as tested by the two-dimensional mental manipulation task) in the ICU group (Figure 3).

We found small associations between specific task scores and reports of poor memory or brain fog in the previous 2 weeks. Among participants with unresolved persistent symptoms, decrements in specific task scores were observed in verbal analogical reasoning accuracy (−0.20 SD among those reporting poor memory and −0.16 among those reporting brain fog), spatial working memory maximum span (−0.15 SD and −0.19 SD, respectively), and immediate memory accuracy (−0.21 SD and −0.16 SD). Among 53,422 participants with resolved symptoms, the profile was similar to that among participants with unresolved persistent symptoms (correlation of absolute effect sizes between the unresolved-symptoms group and the resolved-symptoms group across tasks: poor memory, r=0.81, and brain fog, r=0.76) but with smaller effect sizes in the resolved-symptoms group (maximum effect size, −0.14 SD among those reporting poor memory and −0.11 SD among those reporting brain fog). These associations were all negligible (<0.1 SD) when we contrasted participants who reported poor memory or brain fog with those who did not report such issues among 46,261 participants in the no–Covid-19 group (Figure 4 and Tables S15 and S16).

.......

Discussion

In this large community-based study, we found that Covid-19 was associated with longer-term objectively measurable cognitive deficits. The difference of approximately −0.2 SD in the global cognitive score in the groups of participants who had symptoms that had resolved, as compared with the no–Covid-19 group, is classified as “small” according to Cohen’s effect sizes24; this deficit would equate to a difference of −3 points on a typical IQ scale, in which 1 SD equals 15 points. Participants with unresolved persistent symptoms had a greater mean difference of approximately −0.4 SD. This downward shift was most evident at the distribution extreme,25 with a probability of task performance below the cutoff point for moderate impairment (−2 SD) that was 2.4 times as high among these participants as that in the no–Covid-19 group. ICU admission was associated with larger cognitive differences relative to the no–Covid-19 group (−0.63 SD, equivalent to a difference of −9 IQ points), with the probability of a score that was below −2 SD being 3.6 times as high as that in the no–Covid-19 group; this finding aligns with previous findings of medium-to-large-scale cognitive deficits in patients hospitalized in a critical care unit.

The association between Covid-19 is present, and it is statistically significant, and it is more strongly associated with more severe cases.

Wear your mask.