Many of Covid’s earliest and most alarming effects involve the brain, including a lost sense of smell, sluggish thinking, headaches, delirium and strokes. More than four years after the pandemic began, researchers are recognizing the profound impacts Covid can have on brain health, as millions of survivors suffer from persistent issues such as brain fog, depression and cognitive slowing, all of which hinder their ability to work and otherwise function. Scientists now worry that these symptoms may be early indicators of a coming surge in dementia and other mental conditions, prolonging the pandemic’s societal, economic and health burden.
Tl;Dr There is a chance COVID will have long term effects on your brain. Mainly dementia or other issues.
I’ve had COVID twice since 2019 and both only lasted a few days. Am I brain damaged now? (due to COVID…some might think I was long before this post)
Is my GF becoming a near hermit a reasonable response?
My sense of it is that it is like many other diseases. They are out there but most you are not likely to get and this is in the ballpark of a seasonal flu. Not pleasant but, barring some special circumstances, not to be feared.
FWIW I am almost current on my vaccines (I need the latest one which just came out…same for GF).
I have had blood pressure issues since covid, and much greater fatigue. It could be age-related, of course, but both issues started during a bout of covid, and have only gradually got better since then. My doc suspects “long covid”, but there is no test for it.
I have seen a couple of people go off the rails about covid: one friend is constantly flooding social media with doom-and-gloom articles in a way that seems very parallel to the way others glom onto conspiracy theories. It is true that the government and media communications about covid have slowed or stopped.
My impression based on what I’ve read is that very bad outcomes are indeed possible, but less likely if you are vaccinated and have a mild case (or cases).
Mostly, though, I’m posting because I’m also pretty curious about the current state of knowledge, and I haven’t been able to find any really reliable information that isn’t outdated. My octogenarian father had a second case of covid last month: will this take years off his life, or was it a non-event?
I believe that I had a mild case of covid in January 2023 and then in March 2023 I ended up with pulmonary embolisms despite having all the shots. Not sure if covid was the cause - who knows?
Had a moderate case of covid about 3 weeks ago and still recovering my sense of taste and smell.
There’s almost no way to avoid it so I do the best I can while still living my life. It’s a different world for me than it was in 2019.
I am wondering if any COVID does brain damage or if there is a special version that gives “long COVID” or some special condition a person needs to have the brain damage version.
The people I know who have had it seem fine but maybe in 10 years they won’t be. Do we know?
Just for comparison, * CDC estimates that there have been at least 35 million illnesses, 400,000 hospitalizations, and 25,000 deaths from flu so far this season.
ETA: I started this post a couple hours ago as the first response to the OP. I got called away and now as I finish it I find almost a dozen folks above me have said roughly the same thing. Oops.
IMO & IANA expert, but a decently informed layman.
COVID-19 is still mutating rapidly. Somebody who caught the early version was dealing w something very different ftom 2022- or 2024- or 2026-version COVID. So without more info about which variants people have had, any discussion of long term consequences is made vague & fuzzy.
For most people most times current version COVID is probably a bit more long term consequences than flu, but equally less immediate consequences.
But for some few fraction of the populace, their genetic & immune details line up badly and it’s darn serious.
My own bottom line:
Your GF might be under-reacting if she’s genetically unluckily susceptible or wildly uselessly paranoid if she’s not.
At the worst, both can kill you. At the other end, you can have an asymptomatic case of either flu or covid. Covid is killing more people annually than flu (as of last year, it was a bigger difference before that) and while both can cause “long” illness, that’s more common with covid.
(“Long covid” was recognized in part because it’s similar to “long flu”, which was already known, just a lot less common than long covid.)
Personally, I’m much more worried about covid than about flu. Covid seems more likely to cause dementia, stroke, and kidney disease than flu is. That being said, i don’t think it’s realistic to completely avoid it, unless you only expect another couple years of life. I’m just trying to accept that the world is more dangerous than it used to be. (Antibiotic resistance makes that true of other illnesses, too. Not to mention other emerging diseases like Lyme, EEE, and Zika.)
I’m visiting friends again, but I’m not eating out nearly as often as i used to. I’m wearing masks on public transit (including airports and planes.) But I’ve resumed traveling, I’ve stopped wearing a mask at the grocery store, and I’m planning a new years eve party. But unlike in the past, I’ll be asking people not to come if they feel unwell, and I’ll probably ask them to take a rapid test that day, too. Maybe I’m overly paranoid. My social situation is such that my paranoia doesn’t prevent me from hanging out with people, because i have a lot of paranoid (or paranoid-tolerant) friends. No social life would be a pretty shitty way to live the rest of my life, too.
For some perspective on this, people infected with even mild (or possibly asymptomatic) cases of poliomyelitis occasional have a reoccurrence decades after initial infection of what is termed post polio syndrome which can have serious impacts upon health and quality of life. Of course, most people are familiar with shingles, which is caused by a reemergence of the resident Varicella zoster virus that causes chickenpox in unvaccinated children. Since virtually everyone under the age of thirty has contracted the virus, it is a serious problem that can be debilitating especially for those who are immune compromised or just prone to reemergence. (Fortunately, there is a highly effective shingles vaccine but even that doesn’t totally eliminate all symptoms.)
There is still a lot of study on post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, a.k.a post-covid, ‘long-covid’, or ‘long hauler’ syndrome, which has a wide range of idiopathy symptoms including fatigue, pulmonary and and cardiovascular loss of function, inflammation, increased incidence of Type 2 diabetes and diabetic-like syndromes, pervasive ‘brain fog’, anomalous clotting and vascular dysfunction, and a variety of other long lasting effects. To date, there is little in the way of actual treatment for most of these issues other than steroidal suppression of inflammation and palliative care, and while most patients do recover some significant degree of function and quality of life, some continue to suffer various symptoms for years. At least some SARS-CoV-2 vaccines do appear to provide significant protection against the severity and duration of ‘long covid’ conditions but the extent to which this is broadly true is unclear, and there have been vaccinated patients with a mild initial case of COVID-19 who later suffered significant ‘long covid’ effects.
There are also post-influenza sequelae syndromes but they are much less common, generally occurring in patients with pre-existing health conditions or are immunocompromised. ‘Long covid’ is pervasive, by some estimates appearing to some degree in up to 1 in 5 patients. It is a very serious concern for long term health and is a good reason to continue to get vaccine boosters even though the overall virulence of the current strains of SARS-CoV-2 are not causing the same level of mortality (largely because they’ve already impacted the most vulnerable members of the population).
That may be your personal experience but the mortality rate during the 2020-2022 epidemic ‘season’ of SARS-CoV-2 significantly outpaced all strains of Influenza A by about an order of magnitude. Even with an aggressive variant of influenza such as H1N1/09, it is rare to have ICU wards filled up with patients, and the vast majority are the elderly or immunocompromised, whereas with SARS-CoV-2 there was a non-insignificant number of severe presentations in patients under 65 and even in children. SARS-CoV-2 is still causing more deaths than all human-adapted strains of Influenza A combined, and is close enough genetically to SARS-CoV(-1) and MERS-CoV that there are significant concerns by virologists that it could mutate to express virulence comparable to those betacoronaviruses (in the double digit percentages).
Of course, virologists have long been warning of the pandemic potential for a radically virulent swine flu from recombinant sorting (particularly H1N1 and H3N2), and more recently the H5N1 ‘bird flu’ which has recently been infecting domestic fowl and demonstrated a propensity to jump into mammals including humans (albeit with no known human-to-human transmission to date). And we know that occasionally strains of influenza A occur with virulence in the same range or greater than SARS-CoV-2, although we do have better tools and systems to monitor, control, and treat influenza contagion. We’ve mostly given up on individual tracking of SARS-CoV-2 infections and are just monitoring the incidence of viral fragments in wastewater surveillance and reporting on infections severe enough to require hospitalizations.
Those are all reasonable precautions and rational judgments weighing the benefits and risks of infection. The precautions of 2020-21 had a lot of adverse impacts, especially on childhood development and mental health, and it just isn’t realistic to try to live in a hygienic bubble for the rest of your life. I would personally wear an N95 respirator mask on any aircraft and most contained public transit, but to be honest it is just awkward, uncomfortable, and not conducive to socialization, and while vaccines are far from perfect protection having up-to-date boosters gives good confidence that an infection will be uncomfortable but not life-threatening for the vast majority of basically healthy people. I don’t have much confidence in the lateral flow antigen tests that you take at home in catching early infections, and regardless you can’t really police people to be honest about having used them so aside from explicitly stating the precaution of staying home if not feeling well you are basically accepting that risk, but again, that is true of many other potential infectious agents. Those with immunocompromised conditions should, of course, take the precautions they think necessary regardless of the disapproval of the ‘too cool’ crowd.
Most of my friends felt sick about a day before they tested positive on a covid test. But there’s some evidence that the tests detect about the same level of virus that is correlated with being infectious. So i feel they are moderately valuable. As to policing people to be honest, well, that depends on your friends, of course. I’m reasonably comfortable that mine are honest about these things, but ymmv.
I found it useful at the time, and – glancing back at it now – still do.
I’d like to call particular attention to a post that I made:
This is a known consequence of COVID. I haven’t looked to see if similar studies have been conducted more recently, or if any of these patients have been followed over the subsequent years.
But … cardiac consequences of COVID = no bueno. IANAD, but I’m pretty comfortable that I’m not out over my skis, here
That level of precaution sounds absolutely wacky to me. You do you of course, but assuming you and she are of normal health for your ages, you’re doing something very very few of your peers are.
90+% of America the world is behaving as if COVID is the common cold. Taking no precautions whatsoever. Living just as they did before 2019. And although some people somewhere are dying it’s not like it was in 2020. It’s a background noise-level risk, not a foreground “we’re all gonna die unless we do X” risk.
As @puzzlegal said, the world simply contains a new risk. But it’s no different conceptually than all the other risks we’re more familiar with. There’s an ongoing pandemic of car crashes that kills >40K Americans every year. Do you not drive?
When I talk to her my “advice” (if that is the right word) is to live life. Risks abound but that does not mean we should live in a bubble.
To her, it is not getting the flu. It is getting Long COVID and being wrecked for life.
I’m not sure how to respond to that. I want to travel and take her to dinner and do things. Is asking her to dinner or travel an unreasonable risk? (I do not know and I certainly to not want to see her hurt…or me for that matter)
