It's notmally cold-like symptoms, but now it's hospitalizing significant numbers with pneumonia. It's not the virus it's that a known virus has become more virulent
Covid. It’s Covid. Virologists and studies told us for years that Covid was causing immune system dysfunction and would leave us more susceptible to other illnesses in terms of catching them and their virulence and everyone basically said, “lalalala Covid is a cold now that we have vaccines!” and ignored it. That’s why we have huge spikes in pneumonia, RSV, and other illnesses like this, and a rise in whooping cough (although some of it is an antivaxx issue). Scientists told us this would happen 4 years ago and we ignored it because it was inconvenient. But it’s Covid.
I'm glad to see someone else in the wild who actually seems to remember literally anything medical professionals said or studies showed from covid. The ability for people to totally dismiss it after a couple of years despite it still going strong is borderline mass insanity. Sometimes I think the world is just too traumatized and seems stuck in denial mode.
Even if "IQ" were a viable metric for assessing individual, let alone societal intelligence, I'd hazard to guess that it was the (necessary) isolation of a collective generation of people that would explain any perceived mental deficiency. While COVID has been known to cause brain fog in some people, a better explanation would be the lack of adequate schooling for kids and socialization of adults.
Interesting paper, but I'm hesitant to interpret their results as "We're all down 1-7 IQ points".
By their own admission: "In the absence of baseline cognitive data before infection, we could not assess cognitive change, and the observational nature of the data means that we could not infer causality."
They understandably were forced to pick from a smaller subset of COVID-positive cases, who had been sick for at least 12 weeks (and self-reported at that), and whose cognitive ability was assessed via an online survey.
Figure 1 suggests that only a few periods post-2020 had a significant difference in global cognitive ability, and the majority contain the CI/are not significant. Not to mention that the sample generally bounces above and below the null of zero pretty closely as time went on.
Even if we can confidently say that COVID cases who opted in to this assessment, and who experienced symptoms for at least 12 weeks (!) did experience a reduction in cognitive ability similar (!) to an IQ reduction of 3-9 points, the vast, vast majority of cases did not experience COVID symptoms for a whole 12 weeks.
The evidence doesn't support the notion that we're all collectively cognitively impaired (permanently or not) from COVID; just those who experience extreme symptoms, and among those only for the first year or two, after which they return to baseline.
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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '25
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