In January I wrote about this pandemic as a mass disabling event. My focus was on COVID’s injuries to the brain, which I later posted about in more detail, although it also attacks other organ systems (heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, kidneys…).
My January post attempted to be dry and take the most positive stance I could at the end. Seeing friends and colleagues affected is anything but dry. More and more people I know are emerging from COVID with altered brains and therefore altered selves.
This week I’m in the midst of an especially disturbing interaction with a fully vaccinated friend who recently came through her second bout with COVID. This is someone who used to have a sharp mind, but now tells me a different version of the same story in each sentence of a conversation. Think in terms of telling me that a coat she saw on a rack is red, then in the next sentence it’s blue, then it’s green. She’s at that level of dysfunction.
Between her bouts of COVID, inability to understand contract clauses that used to be a breeze nearly cost her the deal of a lifetime.
Talking with her is frustrating. Trying to do anything with her could drive a person around the bend. There’s no point getting angry about it. She’s doing the best she can.
She doesn’t realize anything is wrong with her cognition or memory. If I try to get her to recognize it, she’ll insist she’s okay. She believes she is okay. Part of the nature of this type of injury is inability to recognize the damage that has been done.
It’s heartbreaking.
It’s also familiar because ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis, inexplicably dubbed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in the States), which swept through the feminist movement as well as other groups in the 1980s, similarly affects cognition, memory, the ability to manage emotions and make decisions… and the ability to recognize the impairments. ME/CFS patients are notorious for overestimating what they can still do, to such an extent that some doctors regard it as a diagnostic flag.
How deep can the losses go? Forty points of performance IQ, gone. Dropping from head of IT for one of the largest banks in the USA to unable to balance a checkbook. For many, no longer being able to process visual stimuli fast enough to drive, even on local back roads. Putting the phone in the freezer and answering the frozen peas. Lots of difficulty coming up with a particular word and putting together sentences in a conversation, resulting in a slow or halting speech pattern. I wish I could say any of those are invented examples, but they are all real.
What I see in COVID survivors I know is much like what I saw in ME/CFS section in the long-gone Chronic Illness Forum where I used to be a volunteer sysop. It’s a form of dementia. Anyone can get it at any age.
Notice I said my friend is fully vaccinated. So are the adults and older offspring in another friend’s household, and on and on through a list of people I know. Some are aware of having brain fog, memory problems and emotional volatility such as surges of anxiety for no apparent reason. Others bumble along believing they’re fully recovered when they are doing the equivalent of asserting a coat was red, then blue, then green in successive sentences of a conversation.
Anyone who is lax about contagion now is playing roulette with this disease.
I’m watching a handful of scientists who seem especially on target and alert about what’s happening. The BA.2 subvariant of Omicron has replaced the initial BA.1 version of Omicron. Scientists describe its transmissibility as comparable to measles. It is more severe and appears to be especially so for children. (Some mainstream media articles say otherwise. Listen to the best of the COVID scientists instead.) Even if you are fully vaccinated, boosted, and had COVID as recently as a couple of months ago, it can still wallop you again.
We still need high quality face masks (at least N95 or FFP2), ventilation (an Italian study found that proper ventilation reduced transmission in schools by 82%), social distancing, air filtration and UV sterilization indoors, visiting each other outdoors, the whole gamut of mitigations against an airborne disease. Ignore anyone who says otherwise. We will continue to need all of this unless and until we administer worldwide a new generation of vaccines that are highly reliable at preventing infection regardless of variant, more like what we developed against smallpox and polio, and antivirals are readily available for those who can’t take or can’t respond fully to vaccines.
There are people working on second generation vaccines, but that will take time. Antivirals are still scarce, but should become more available as manufacturing continues.
As I said before, we need to look for ways to heal this damage to the brain.
We also need to find ways to carry on when a growing proportion of us are hobbled like this.
While we’re working on it, your well fitted high quality face mask is a sign of your intelligence. It’s also the self-defense you can control the best on your own.