My wife has postcovid and this is a profound effect. Yesterday she tried to add up a series of numbers by heart, and she simply couldn’t. For context, she’s pretty mathy and used to mock me for taking out a calculator or a spreadsheet for stuff like that. She also forgets everything, which is another thing she used to be great at. It’s pretty confronting, especially now that the idea that maybe this isn’t temporary is taking shape.
Is there any real world test where higher IQ people do better than anyone else deterministically?
I am not talking about correlations.
I am talking about people with higher IQ can solve X problem that people with lower IQs can't.
Not the ability to spot back & white patterns on a screen.
The riches people are not the highest IQ people
The Noble Prize Winners are not the highest IQ people
The best sports players are not the highest IQ people
The best mathematicians are not the highest IQ people
The best musicians are not the highest IQ people.
None of the these have excellence that can be deterministically determined by IQ. So what exactly is it good for?
Here in western europe IQ tests are unheard of. I never met anyone (people at work, family members, close friends, acquaintances, etc.) who has taken such a test.
You have to take an IQ test as part of an ADHD diagnosis.
I genuinely don't know why, but you do have to.
I got diagnosed for ADHD in 2021 and nobody asked me to do an IQ test. In fact, no one has ever asked me to do one in my entire life.
Your anecdote is not data.
Also makes no sense whatsoever as ADHD does not affect IQ in any form. It's a form of dopamine dysregulation, not a learning disability. Let's stop perpetuating this stupid myth.
It does affect concentration and if an IQ test goes on for long enough and is not interesting enough to warrant some kind of hyperfocus, I get distracted. And so my IQ score will be worse. Or not? I have ADHD and it doesn't make me dumber, but since focus is a critical part of thinking, it does make it harder if I'm not interested. I'd rather say that IQ tests are designed for neurotypical people.
IQ is not concentration. In fact, IQ or intelligence in general does not have a single accepted definition†. You are not "stupider" because you have no patience to sit down to concentrate to do a silly test. Nor you are "smarter" because you found it so engaging you hyperfocused and did it in one sitting.
IQ tests are designed by people that want to create automatons easy to quantify and categorize.
† My definition of intelligence is "ability to solve novel problems." With this definition, an uncontacted tribesperson can be as intelligent as a Nobel prize winner. The difference is education, and the type of problems they're facing, which is just a matter of context.
I have ADHD and I do great on IQ tests, each question is a little thing to answer, I move quickly through them and get a quick dopamine hit. If there is something difficult then I can get stuck there and thrown off my rhythm, but this seldom happens.
Erh, where in the world?
Evidently I am an outlier? I was asked to do it twice as part of ADHD diagnosis.
Once in the UK as a pre/early teen (2003~), and once in Sweden to be rediagnosed via a private company named Modigo (so, now I am not sure if it's standard as part of the healthcare system here).
Since I was 2/2 and that was 100% of my experiences throughout two countries, I thought it was the standard.
This is not correct. At least not in the U.S. as a whole.
It may of course be true where you are.
The DSM does not even suggest an IQ test as part of the diagnostic.
Knowing 6+ people in several states with ADHD diagnoses (some as children, some as adults) none have had anything beyond questions with their physician… or diagnoses by a psychiatrist after starting therapy for a different issue.
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html
Western Europe is a big place. I guess it also depends on whether you only count tests conducted in a professional setting. Here in Germany, i guess at least 20% of people between 20 and 40 have taken some kind of IQ test, e.g. online. Not everyone might admit it because it could come of as a little "vain", but there are even IQ test shows on popular TV channels (Sat 1, RTL 2) where the viewers do the test. They run them at primetime every few years.
Pretty much every adult male in Austria did an IQ test during draft inspection.
Try the British Army Cognitive Test https://www.google.com/search?q=british+army+cognitive+test , the Danish draft board's Børge Priens Prøve (BPP), and any other european country with an induction test for military recruits.
(Czech Republic) I took one in high school, it was optional and paid, but sort of organized by the school. I think we took it instead of some morning classes. I got an official-looking Mensa application form attached to the results, so I think it was pretty legit. (never applied though)
Maintaining a high level of civilization
So when civilizations collapse like a Ancient Egyptian, Rome, Ancient China & Ancient Greece.
What it the IQ that also dropped to cause the civilization collapse?
I think I read that most ancient civilizations collapsed because of environmental factors. The environment changed, and they couldn't cope with it for some reason (lack of technology was probably a big part).
As for China, I don't think that one ever "collapsed". It withdrew, but I don't think you can call it a "collapse" the way many other ancient civilizations did. Even Rome is a bit hard to call a full collapse: it degraded over the course of centuries, and eventually Europe turned to feudalism. The Roman Empire itself split apart, with the eastern part (in Constantinople) continuing for another 1000 years after the western side fell apart.
I think civilizations like the Assyrians and Hittites are better examples of civilizations that truly "collapsed": there's basically nothing left of them today, except some ruins.
They probably got covid.
The inability to recognise how an intelligence trait that correlates with pattern recognition might have an effect on being able to predict the long-term outcome of one's actions and provides the ability to work well with others in a very large group, which a civilization is, and instead defaulting to an ad absurdum argument shows where you might fall on the IQ spectrum.
I doubt such a test is possible because IQ is trying to be a single number. Intelligence isn’t really generalized like that.
My question is. What is this Number measuring?
Why don't you crack open Wikipedia and start from there?
IQ as measured seems to be intended to be a "mental maturity index".
It's best administered to children to understand where they are relative to other children and makes little sense in adults.
That's why IQ is age dependent. A 12 year old with a 140 IQ should have the mental pattern matching recognition as a normal 14 year old with 100 IQ.
The standard deviation is based on the next year ups mean IQ and so on.
It doesn't necessarily measure intelligence, but in children it can be used as a proxy for intelligence since usually brain maturity is directly linked to intelligence.
this is just a guess but I'm betting that if you take the best Nobel Prize Winners, and the best Mathematicians and give them IQ tests their average will be higher than the average of the general population (or the mean if you will)
the best sports players and best musicians I would also suppose were higher IQ on average than normal sports players (I suppose this term means professional athletes) and normal musicians (professional musicians)
In the musicians category I wouldn't be surprised if the best musicians were also smarter than the general population.
In short I think IQ tests are a lousy metric, sure, but it is not a completely useless measure - just nearly useless.
On edit: clarification, fixed wrong capitalization.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/05/fact-check-b...
The funny thing about specialists is that they can easily embarrass themselves when outside their field.
Watching your average politician talk about technology is a pretty great example of people speaking with zero context. Some of them clearly aren't dumb but they can get in over their heads with ease.
The funny thing about this conversation here though is I was talking about means and averages and you gave me an example of a single guy, also I said outliers in their fields might have higher than average general ability - I don't know why anyone would assume that higher than average general ability would equal expertise in unstudied specialties?
In the musicians category I wouldn't be surprised if the best musicians were also smarter than the general population.
I seriously doubt that, actually. Are they more musically gifted? Sure. Smarter overall? I'm not so sure. It would be an interesting study.
I imagine the ones who are both successful musicians and businesspeople (i.e., they run the business themselves mostly, in addition to being musicians) probably are very intelligent, because that requires a broad range of skills. The ones who are just good at playing an instrument or singing some lyrics that someone else wrote? Not so much.
This is like saying that since the tallest people are not the best basketball players, height in basketball doesn't matter.
Bingo.
IQ tests being useful and IQ bragging or judgement being stupid are not mutually exclusive
This makes sense. Making any sort of judgment based on IQ scores is stupid but IQ test scores are useful because
These "facts" pulled out of your ass are demonstrably false.
A typical IQ score for a mathematics PhD graduate is a couple of standard deviations above the mean.
IQ is correlated with intelligence, and higher intelligence enables greater achievements.
IQ doesn’t seem to be an ideal metric for macro level civilisation intelligence. A lot of what it optimises for is replaced by technology. If we’re measuring intelligence at that level I’d hope for something like theory of mind/spiral dynamics, testing how wide someone’s perspective is.
Is their world model limited to themselves, their family, their village, their country, their race, their world, their species, their system? Combined with their understanding of social dynamics at each level.
I think the average GenZ in the US is at beginning of global scale, which is great for acceptance of different cultures; but without understanding the social dynamics yet. Giving us “woke” because they understand different cultures have different contexts, this is good but incomplete. E.g. some cultures aren’t aligned with the entire species, like controlling women in a way that leads to bad outcomes as technology adds complexity to our social dynamics.
Measuring this perspective level would help us understand which cultural models work best in adapting with growth and are more likely to be sustainable post-scarcity.
The riches people are not the highest IQ people The Noble Prize Winners are not the highest IQ people The best sports players are not the highest IQ people The best mathematicians are not the highest IQ people The best musicians are not the highest IQ people.
These may not be the highest IQ people, but very few are low IQ (below 90).
Because it matters in aggregate. Also, most of those individual categories you listed are, in fact, high IQ outliers, especially when it comes to Fields medalists and Nobel laureates. And you made it evident by your post that you are, in fact, low IQ.
It's supposed to measure general intelligence (supposing there is such a thing, which I doubt). Correlation is the only thing it's trying to do.
If you had a specific test like you're after... that would be by definition not general intelligence, but rather some specific intelligence.
The title is misleading, at least on the IQ claim. The underlying study was observational and did not claim causation.
Medical journals and their associated media summaries are awash with low-certainty studies that get de-nuanced and overhyped. These studies are relatively easy to do - not to denigrate the work put in by the original study authors (it’s not their fault the press sensationalize their work). But for strong causative claims you ideally would have blinded controlled randomized trials. Sometimes such trials are not feasible, but that doesn’t mean you get to claim causation anyway just because the work to prove it is too hard.
It's less misleading then you might think.
There are cases (enough to not be treated as just some random coincidence; with and without vaccination) where people after Covid had a sever reduction of cognitive abilities that they have problems filling out relatively simple forms. So we can clearly speak of a reduction of IQ.
And while there is a lot of research needed and a lot of open questions and already half a year (or so?) into the pandemic we did know from how we observed COVID affecting the brain that it likely will cause a reduction in cognitive abilities at least in some cases which matches the (very many) observations we had since then.
This also matches what we know from other older studies about other virus infections which have some similarity with covid, e.g. causing Neuroinflammation. So every thing we observe and do know about the underlying mechanics implies that there is very likely a causation. (Through we need more studies for Neuroinflammation.)
So scientist do need to research it more and do need to pin down the exact mechanisms this causes reduction of cognitive abilities in some cases to largely varying degrees and how much of it is a direct and a indirect e.g. psychological effect.
But for everyone else it best to assume that getting COVID might reduce IQ if they are unlucky. Because if you aren't a doctor, scientist or similar but just a random person who got COVID it kind doesn't matter if your IQ gets reduced by COVID directly or indirectly or just correlated due to some other factor you don't know about and in turn can't systematically avoid.
I do not think IQ tests are meant or designed to measure effects from illness. We do not say that IQ drops when you are sick with the flu and have high fever that makes it hard to think. IQ does not drop when you wake up groggy in the morning up until you drink coffee. I am not sure why people use IQ here instead of referring specifically to brain fog and other symptoms of post-COVID infection. IQ does not drop when you get sick and does not increase when you get treatment. If that is the case, then it is even worse measure than it is supposed to be, because it does not measure anything remotely stable.
The tests themselves are misleading.
If I do one sober, I have an IQ of 110, if I do it with my ADHD meds, it goes up to 120.
Is that because the meds make me smarter? No, it's because I don't lose attention after 10 minutes of test and can concentrate until the end. However, the numbers imply otherwise.
One could argue that concentration is an aspect of intelligence.
It isn't though, but both intelligence and concentration are necessary for actual performance. Intelligence is only a potential.
Concentration is an aspect of applied intelligence. To take an IQ test is to measure applied intelligence.
Is that because the meds make me smarter?
At some level, IQ tests measure your ability to take IQ tests. So it would make sense that your measured IQ would go up when you're on ADHD meds, since those will obviously have an effect on your ability to take IQ tests.
Maybe yes, they do. Have you seen this famous article after GPT-2 came out? https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/humans-not-concentrat...
Who says there’s even anything stable to measure?
If “intelligence” is just the degree/quality of someone’s brain function then your intelligence does drop when your brain function is impaired, and you would expect that to be picked up in an intelligence test.
Culturally we may want to imagine intelligence as something constant and innate to somebody’s soul, but in reality it’s innate to a fragile and fickle organ inside your skull.
Culturally we may want to imagine intelligence as something constant and innate to somebody’s soul, but in reality it’s innate to a fragile and fickle organ inside your skull.
Which is also my issue with IQ tests and the relationship of the tests and what they measure. But that changes nothing: IQ tests are not supposed to measure _that_ variability of when you get sick. Or you wake up. Or you are drunk. It makes no sense to use a psychometric test completely out of the context of which it was validated and meant to be used, because then the results are not interpretable. People with that kind of post-covid syndrom have an illness and experience cognitive deficits because of that, but using IQ to measure intelligence in that case when what you actually (want to) measure is brain fog is absurd. That should require a brain fog screening, not an IQ test.
One of the major uses of IQ tests is to measure brain damage, otherwise why would they be mostly calibrated in the downwards direction? Who do you think pays for these things?
otherwise why would they be mostly calibrated in the downwards direction? Who do you think pays for these things?
I always assumed it was because there are people born with impaired intellectual abilities, and having some measure of how impaired they are would be significant for things like edibility for benefits and management of their condition (e.g. goals for the school system).
Except chronic fatigue / long covid could affect IQ as tested. It might be that you have the CPU but the power supply isn't up to voltage, so to speak, so the CPU has to run slow.
But for everyone else it best to assume that getting COVID might reduce IQ if they are unlucky.
Why assume it if it's not proven yet? We had crazy assumptions on the way lightning worked, I'm glad we have empirical natural sciences now to counter these "wide spread assumptions".
Wrt covid and IQ. Say that during covid IQs measurably dropped: why says its not the WFH, the fear that was rampant or the mRNA vaccine that was massively injected? There for we need bigger studies, control groups, randomization. All of this is there for good reasons (and a lot of this was skipped in the development of mRNA vaccines for a bad reason: fear).
Seconding the sentiment here. Quibbling about "causal" being used in the title aside, we're building more observational evidence that there's negative cognitive effects associated with covid and long covid.
Zhao et al '24 [0] comes immediately to mind; operating on a radically different set of people and data sets from Al-Aly and the gang, they find substantial differences in simple reaction time between covid and no-covid groups.
It seems we're in a phase of the pandemic where denying long tail effects is going to become more prominent as concerning evidence continues to pile up. The name of the game is still to reduce your infection count as much as possible. Stay safe out there, share aerosols unprotected at your own peril.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... "Long COVID is associated with severe cognitive slowing: a multicentre cross-sectional study"
I experienced some limitations of cognitive abilities but not sure was it due to COVID or some sort of depression
That settles it then. Causation proved.
I too have lost solid 20 points immediately after infection. Took the test precisely because the fall was so sharp and deep. Scoff all you want but for me it's settled.
Yeah, same thing here. Pretty significant drop in cognitive abilities I feel like.
That's why the most important element in science is replication - direct (repeating the same experiment) and indirect (refining the original experiment, or testing for the opposite result, or an alternative - here we could test reflexes instead of IQ).
And here there is already a lot of replication for several years - plus direct observation of bleeding into the brain.
https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/2024/trinity-team-di...
Thanks for this link on brain fog, I had that for a year after getting Covid early before vaccines were available.
I know there was work recently that found blood tests can find various markers of long covid, I'd like to get this done - but it's not something widely available.
A relative has been getting strange post-viral like symptoms since before Xmas (though no obvious Covid infection), would be great to get them tested too.
Good study design trumps replication. If you construct a shitty misleading study and everybody jumps on the hype train to replicate you've netted negative on the replication axis.
Could it be just a correlation?
Maybe something like people with lower IQ are less likely to do a job where they can work from home so they are more likely to have been exposed to the virus?
The article mentions studies that measure IQ before and after a Covid infection, it's hard to see how working from home or not could be relevant for these.
It says "studies suggest"; how much more hedging do you want?
The studies don't actually 'suggest' any causality. Just like the studies in question don't suggest that the moon is made of cheese. So you wouldn't want to write either in a headline.
'Covid infections associated with IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest'.
You can even remove the 'studies suggest' part in that case to get just 'Covid infections associated with IQ drops and years of brain aging'
cope
If this is true, you should expect results to be the same across countries, and the measurable drops in IQ should correlate to infection rates.
Five bucks says you won't find that.
It's almost impossible to compare IQ tests across countries, because cognition test results are really only valid for people from the cultural context the test was written for.
If true, this seems quite damning for IQ as a metric. If the kilogram varied across countries, we would be in big trouble.
IQ metrics are continually damned. There is still no real consensus that they are useful at all. But the social sciences is filled with a lot of soft metrics like IQ because studying complex human behavior with hard science is very hard, and probably impossible.
They are also constantly defended.
Good, calibrated IQ tests measure something, and that something has a positive correlation with work efficiency in at least certain types of work.
That said, there are many types of IQ tests and some of them are in my opinion rather weird, for example anything where your score depends on your knowledge of English language or English history as I hear has traditionally been the case in US.
Around here it seems they try to make the tests as little dependent on language, history and even math as possible and the ones I have taken has largely been about:
- pattern matching (of these 6 squares with various patterns, which one doesn't fit in?)
- sequences (based on these 3 squares with patterns, which is the next one?)
- and that kind of stuff
These skills are things that are very real, very measurable and often linked to work throughput. Yes, I rarely visualize boxes in my head and rotate them and I rarely sift through through black and white squares with alternating patterns at work, but it seems the ability to do so is often linked to the ability to mentally single step code or spot patterns in bug reports.
It doesn't mean that you are good person if your score is high (or low) and it doesn't mean that you will be a good employee and not waste your time on HN.
The tests that work in measuring human behavior are fairly simply and very repeatable. Think Fitts's or Hick's Law, which involve hit testing and searching through an unsorted list. I can imagine pattern matching being fairly repeatable as well, but I'm not sure how it really relates to real problem solving. Then again, medical doctors are basically pattern matchers (and why they are fairly excited about AI assistance in...matching patterns).
One of them is https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16123251/ but there's a few more.
Anyway, it seems obvious it's culture dependent. Given a person with usual western education and a person who's never dealt with shapes and abstract straight lines in their life - would you expect them to score similarly if they're both very intelligent people? These tests heavily rely on geometric puzzles which already make an assumption about education. The tricky question is how much does that affect differences you'd see between random people tested for comparison.
The approach's limitations are pretty well-known, though the results have always been considered estimates rather than absolute values. The "Reliability and validity" section of the wikipedia page for Intelligence_quotient is actually a pretty solid and well-written overview if you're looking for one.
The mere assumption that something as multidimensional as intelligence can be quantified along a single axis is already highly suspect. How can you compare the mental abilities of Einstein and Bach and Shakespeare and Magnus Carlesen and Zidane?
It's true, fwiw.
It's not about comparing IQ between countries, it's about pre covid IQ scores with post covid IQ scores within the same country
If two countries both report a 5-point shift, how do you know the shift is actually the same size if the points are counted differently?
Perhaps the actual change was bigger or smaller but the approach to measurement highlighted the change more or less strongly. There's no statistical validity to be had.
I suppose you can’t compare the absolute results but you can see if there is a similar trend.
That's why Raven's progressive matrices were invented. And in spite of it being developed by westerners, East Asian countries tend to score highest on it.
cognition test results are really only valid for people from the cultural context the test was written for.
They're perfectly good for looking at changes over time within a population, you just have to be careful doing between-population comparisons (whether a test is "valid" at that point depends what specific question you want to answer).
Except parent poster isn't talking about doing that, they're talking about computing the relative change over time separately and individually for each country within its own singular unique cultural-context et-cetera.
Then those ratios are what you compare across countries, which is significantly less-problematic.
You should not assume that the effects of a disease are the same for all populations on the planet.
OP didn't assume it, they hypothesized about it and laid out a way to falsify the hypothesis.
If you accept "cognitive impairment" as a drop in IQ, then this meta study seems to find that globally after infection, and I claim my $5:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34973396/
A significant proportion of individuals experience persistent fatigue and/or cognitive impairment following resolution of acute COVID-19.
Ten studies analyzed data from Italy, nine from Spain, eight from the US, seven from China, six from the UK, three from Denmark, France, and Norway, respectively, two from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Russia, and the Netherlands, respectively, and one from Belgium, the Czech Republic, England, Faroe Islands, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey, respectively...
good save. The impairment is quite apparent from what I've observed and I suspect this is even harder to accept in work context; no one wants to admit they're impaired if you work in knowledge economy where IQ is seen as somewhat correlated to your performance career wise.
Five $ isn’t very much.
I’m curious why you don’t think you’d find that. I very much believe you would.
In about 5 minutes I found papers on cognitive impairment for post-covid groups vs healthy controls in multiple non-North American countries, including one from Spain [1] where there was a measurably lower correlating IQ estimation for the PCC group than the HC group.
1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9631485/
Do you have a more specific hypothesis of what wouldn't be found elsewhere? Because it looks like you'd be out of $5 from any takers currently.
cope
I had similar symptoms.
In my case it was just a vitimin D deficiency caused by working from home.
I don't doubt some people have suffered neurological damage, but I wouldn't be surprised if many are suffering the same as I was.
Are you working in the cellar at home? Why would you have less vitamin D working from home than say, an office?
Even just 15 mins in the sun helps vitamin D levels so walking from the house to the car into the office and back again is enough to make a difference compared to not going out at all, no?
You mean some people only go out to work?
If true, OK, I was wrong about WFH/hybrid being superior to RTO, I guess different people mean different habits.
I live in the UK, it was only a few weeks ago it stopped being dark when I finish work. Climate is a bitch.
That is offtopic no? people driving/walking/cycling to work face the same climate and hours with sunlight.
One of the nice things that usually comes from WFH is a bit more flexibility in work time schedule. I usually go for a walk at least once during the day, usually to get groceries, and every other week I have to pickup my smallest daughter in primary school. And when the weather is nice and the days short in winter I would often do a 2 to 3h pause during the day to go for a cycling ride.
People who only go outside during daylight hours to go to the office are a bit of a symptom of a problem, not really a solution.
I am working from home and the first thing I want to do when I stop working is going outside. I also, and as do many of my coworker, go for a walk at least once a day.
WFH doesn't mean you are chained to your desk from 8am to 5pm
Depends upon what latitude you live at.
Where I am, the sun isn't strong enough to trigger synthesis from October until the end of April.
After that you need a lot of skin exposed to get anything, which is difficult 'cos it ain't that warm.
There is a reason red hair appeared in Southern Scotland/Northern Ireland.
Unless you're teleporting or living there, getting from home to the office normally involves at least some exposure to sunlight.
Working from home doesn't mean you are forced or even have any incentive to stay at home all day long.
When did I say I was forced?
Are you actually responding to what I said, or are you just preemptively attacking what you (incorrectly) assume is an anti wfh statement?
I am just disputing the causality of that deficiency of vitamin D. WFH has nothing to do with the fact one doesn't spend some time outside every day.
OK but the OP didn't say all people get vitamin D deficiency from working at home, they were only describing their own experience.
That's not exlusive to covid, but happens with all acute infections. It has long been known that the number of infections correlate with IQ loss.
"People with five or more hospital contacts with infections had an IQ score of 9.44 lower than the average."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150521095016.h...
Permanent impairment or temporary? Brain cells / connections permanently gone forever, or a temporary loss of some nutrients in the brain that can be recovered later on?
Probably depends on the individual, whether the immune system is able to fully go back to baseline, or remains activated chronically.
I've been hospitalised three times with severe infections, and sent to the minor injuries unit once with an infection that would've gotten severe, but caught early with oral antibiotic. Makes me wonder what I'd be like if I never got hit by anything.
I thought tiktok caused that.
tiktok was doing this before covid was around.
There was a massive increase in TikTok's user base between 2020 to now, though, so it's worth investigating.
Double whammy!
There are studies that have been done comparing people who had COVID-19, versus people who didn't, and then gave them cognitive testing to measure their ability to cognitively process information and test their IQ. And there's very clear differences in the IQ of people who had been infected with COVID-19 versus people who did not. Even mild COVID can give people about a three-point loss of IQ.
Hasn't pretty much the entire population of earth been infected by COVID at least once at this point?
I had no symptoms and was not tested for COVID. I have been testing my self regularly during pandemic, however not always with PCR.
The people reporting not to have been infected would have had extremely mild, non symptomatic infections, such that they didn’t notice them. I assume the symptoms are what cause the long term damage.
Neuroinflammation is a poorly studied area and one likely cause of brain fog and mecfs/long covid symptoms. Jarred Younger [1] is a researcher studying this and has a youtube channel [2] where he discusses his latest work. If you're interested in this it's worth watching!
Also please ignore anyone that posts 'oh its just X' or 'just do X', whatever X may be. This is a complicated medical mystery that millions of patients have suffered from for decades if you include mecfs and postviral conditions. There is no X, patients have tried every possible X. Anyone who tells you its just X is revealing their lack of understanding of the issue (this happens every time this subject shows up on HN and elsewhere).
[1] https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Jarred_Younger
[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoVoOvIX90IMEZCbBf_ycEA
Wasn't there a paper that proposed the idea that long Covid is actual replicating virus that replicates in very low numbers.
Viral persistence is one theory that may explain a subset of long covid and other postviral cases (mecfs example [1]). There's lots of theories including itaconate shunt [2] and metabolic trap [3], glutamate toxicity [4], cranio-cervical instability and infections causing breakdown of tendons [5], gut biome imbalances [6][7], endothelial damage, and others. I'm not sure what the most promising ones are but the search for biomarkers continues.
What we call long covid or mecfs or chronic lyme or fibromyalgia etc etc are all umbrella terms for symptom clusters so they lack some specificity and are likely multi-causal. There are many overlaps in LC and mecfs patient populations in studies (vs controls), so its likely a fair-to-significant amount of LC is actually what we call mecfs.
Much of the mystery and suffering of long covid would have been avoided if we'd invested anything in investigating these conditions pre-covid (mecfs has the least funding to disease burden and the worst quality of life of all major diseases), but the medical community generally didn't want to believe these diseases were real. Same thing happened with autoimmune conditions like lupus and MS before their mechanisms were discovered. All of these conditions predominately affect women.
[1] https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Persistent_infection_hypothesis
[2] https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Itaconate_shunt_hypothesis
[3] https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_trap
[4] https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Glutamate
[5] https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Craniocervical_instability
Yet another observational study with no real comparison. The REACT dataset used by the study relies mostly on self reported surveys and data from people sick enough to go to the doctor. This has obvious problems.
The idea that there is a control arm of people who haven’t gotten Covid large enough to power a real control here is farcical. Again, a problem of self selection for people committed enough to maintain a large level of isolation for multiple years.
Any causal study here should be looking at a differential in pre and post covid cognitive scores with a control of known uninfected participants in the same time window.
The idea that there is a control arm of people who haven’t gotten Covid large enough to power a real control here is farcical.
Why? Whether someone has ever been infected is testable. About 20% of the US population had not had COVID as of some point in 2023.
which tests are you talking about? Antibody titers only work for a few months, and as far as I understand they’re the standard test.
Why do you believe that 20% of the U.S. population hasn’t had covid?
There are studies that have been done comparing people who had COVID-19, versus people who didn't, and then gave them cognitive testing to measure their ability to cognitively process information and test their IQ. And there's very clear differences in the IQ of people who had been infected with COVID-19 versus people who did not. Even mild COVID can give people about a three-point loss of IQ.
That sounds like an observational study. It's hard to get from that correlation to the causation in the headline. The article does not mention this problem at all as far as I can tell.
I guess the title wouldn't have been as interesting if it was "Stupid people more likely to get covid"
There might also be a third thing (or many) that causes both.
I feel like this is a messaging roll out?
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/faustfiles/109672 -- an interview from 2 days ago where the NIH leader says covid is persistent for months or years in people and the MD interviewer did a double take.
Not sure why there's a shift happening, maybe some new publication? This has been shaping up for years now.
The relevant bit of transcript:
Faust: I just want to follow up on something you said a moment ago about where this virus can be found in tissues. Are you suggesting that long COVID is actually, the mechanism of that, is persistent live virus in humans?
Bertagnolli: We see evidence of persistent live virus in humans in various tissue reservoirs, including surrounding nerves, the brain, the GI [gastrointestinal] tract, to the lung.
Faust: OK. And you're saying this goes beyond the PCR's [polymerase chain reaction test] ability to get it in a regular swab so that we are missing chronic cases of SARS‑CoV‑2?
Bertagnolli: Correct. The virus can persist in tissues for months, perhaps even years.
Faust: OK. I think that's certainly one theory, but I'm not sure that that's settled. Is that fair? I mean, there's one thing between people who are autopsy, they died of viral sepsis, as opposed to people walking around. Is there a distinction there?
Bertagnolli: Our emerging data shows that the virus can persist into tissues in the long term, and I think that's really critical because it does help us think about possible ways to combat it, one being better antivirals. I think there's a lot of focus on developing new antivirals as a possible way of preventing long COVID, and the other might be more aggressive treatment with antiviral therapy upon initial diagnosis.
Faust: If that's the case, then it could be reactivated just like herpes is and shingles. Are we going to start seeing people get COVID not from infection, but from themselves in reactivation?
Bertagnolli: I don't believe I've seen or heard of any instance of that, and I don't think you can ever assume that one virus is going to act like another. Certainly every virus that we know of seems to have a different effect in the body long term.
could they express their findings in a way that doesn't include "IQ" in it?
I really dont think we know what Intelligence is, let alone how to define it universally enough to make a quotient of it.
peak midwit take
The cognitive decline can also be attributed to extreme isolation that everyone was subjected to. My super enriched, flow like heavenly water life came to a complete standstill. All future plans and timelines thrown in disarray. Covid has ended but my life trajectory has completely changed
Yes, I mean it's been shown how people with a loss of hearing have an increased risk of dementia and it's natural that this would apply here as well. It's just another form of lost stimuli. But there might also be medical reasons behind this and this serves to show how complex this is to research.
I went through a mild COVID-19 infection, and felt the sluggishness in my brain for quite some time. I think I recovered, but it was a jarring experience.
Same here. And the random days where I wouldn't be able to concentrate, even a few months later after feeling better, were really unpleasant.
I wonder if covid infections, perhaps in rare cases the vaccines themselves, is to blame for the post-pandemic phenomena of ADHD medication shortages, the crime wave, school discipline (lack of), the so-called college enrollment crises (precipitous decline), and record low OECD test scores.All of these can be explained by dopamine dysregulation.
Most of those can be explained by the lockdowns and school closures, which made millions of lower class people even poorer and worsened their children's educational outcomes. More poverty + missed schooling = more crime, less college enrollment and worse test scores.
I think I'd attribute my newfound slowness to lockdowns, rather than COVID?
Lack of practicing talking and remembering stuff is bad for talking and remembering stuff, and it definitely happened long before I caught COVID, because I caught COVID super late
it definitely happened long before I caught COVID
Why do you assume that you weren't asymptomatic?
40.5% of people who contract the virus have no symptoms.I felt much sharper before I had COVID last December and I still don't feel like I've fully recovered from the fog.
i did pure oxygen in a pressure chamber for about 4 weeks, it got significantly better after that, at least in my perception. Could be also just the time after the infection
I wonder if the study segmented the participants according to vaccination status (before/after infection, or none at all)?
I am suffering from LC myself for 2 years now. The Brainfog is intense, the fatigue tiring. I'm mentally really low. It's nice to see some news regarding COVID.
My story is on my blog https://tunn3l.pro
I definitely feel 'less sharp' at times, however in my case I may have other factors going on. I did have Omicron and possibly something very weird about the time Covid started to show up in the USA
I'd be interested in if there was a gene that significantly reduced covid infection likelihood - but somehow didn't affect much else, like other viral infection rates.
That would almost be a natural sort of experiment, to compare the IQ of these and other population.
Though, you would have to have enough people in this group, not be too rare. And it would help if there was already a large population that was IQ measured prior to Covid, and could be re-measured.
It seems unlikely that such a scenario exists.
My bet is that trolls in government, fake news and anti-scientific facts injected in vein 24/7/365, helped a lot to grease that piggy.
Accelerated brain decay with the last and current politics in the planet is basically guaranteed.
I had brain fog with COVID but it does get better with time. Still sometimes struggle to find the right word. There is also Alzheimer's in my family so that is something additional to worry about
2015 observational study suggests these results are not unique to Covid: ""Our research shows a correlation between hospitalisation due to infection and impaired cognition corresponding to an IQ score of 1.76 lower than the average. People with five or more hospital contacts with infections had an IQ score of 9.44 lower than the average. The study thus shows a clear dose-response relationship between the number of infections, and the effect on cognitive ability increased with the temporal proximity of the last infection and with the severity of the infection." Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150521095016.h...
The symptoms of tingling in the extremities resemble what my wife experienced after her chemo when the treatment damaged her neurons' myelin sheath. This causes 'noisy' neuron signals to be transmitted (tingles, lack of sensation, etc.). If the same thing happened in the brain, I bet the noisy signals would lead to brain fogginess, forgetfulness, etc. Back then, she was taking omega-3 supplements and received shots of vitamin B12. After a year, it removed almost all the tingling, but some sensations never fully came back.
This is not medical advice (and check with your doctor beforehand), but it feels like taking vitamin B12 and omega-3 supplements should be a pretty low-risk bet to try to improve your situation if you're experiencing the long COVID symptoms described in the article.
I'm dismayed by the number of people who apparently don't subscribe to evidence-based medicine using proper statistical methodology and instead rely on anecdotal evidence whenever Covid comes up. It's very irrational, though some of this behavior can probably be explained by the extreme politicization of the topic in the US.
A reading of Oliver Sach's pop-sci books on encephalitis & PVS suggests we've actually been here before in the 19th and 20th century with cognitive and other effects down to post viral conditions. It's just another instance of something we probably know happens.
I think we still have yet to learn about how else COVID could have affected us
A Chinese researcher speculated this would be a major source of worldwide cognitive decline. Perhaps the Chinese knew something about the disease we don't leading to their extreme lockdowns.
Idiocracy
I've noticed my memory and math skills getting worse as well. Can't say it's covid for sure though as there are other likely explanations too: getting fatter and out of shape, finishing uni and going out of practice, long-term sleep deprivation, etc.
Either way, if not covid, then I think at least the lockdowns did have an impact on my health and ability to stay fit.
The studies cited do not prove any causative association. They lack controls and other design elements that would account for misattribution and the impact of COVID-related psychosocial factors on observed symptoms.
In general, there is an extreme lack of rigor seen in claims about long COVID. The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
Maybe Covid will be The End of the Whole Mess after all.
Has she been vaccinated? How many times?
Australia has a population of 26 million, longer life expectancy than the USofA, and comprehensive medical records going back many decades.
With ~98% of the population COVID vaccinated multiple times any vaccine effects would stick out like dogs balls.
If anyone wants to posit "vaccines cause { stupid | strokes | etc }" Then such correlations should be readily apparent in the before | after records of 26 million test subjects.
Australia's excess death rate is still higher than pre-covid: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-20/mortality-rates-austr... . If the Australian government released the data it'd be trivial to identify whether these deaths were concentrated in the vaccinated or the unvaccinated, but so far it hasn't released such data (if it even possesses such data in aggregate format).
Well, in that case, good that Australia isn't the only country in the world: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
which clearly shows that all-cause deaths in England were higher among the unvaccinated.
Here is a Reuters fact check: https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/no-evidence-link-uk-exces...
The UK ONS data used to have the obvious flaw that people dropping dead 3 days after their first dose were defined as „unvaccinated“. In this regard, the significant uptick in deaths in summer 2021 in „unvaccinated“ looked interesting to say the least.
How are they doing their definitions now? Could not find it.
Meanwhile this new Dutch data looks quite interesting, maybe someone here would like to give it a shot:
https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/longread/rapportages/2022/sterfte-e...
https://opendata.ecdc.europa.eu/covid19/
By now there is a hell lot of data pointing at issues with the novel pharmaceutical product. Meanwhile governments all over the world continue to be reluctant to issue data on e.g. „long covid“ or immune system problems in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated, although this data would settle the debate once and for all if its outcome is in favor of getting the shots.
„Fact checkers“ have been shown again and again to be politically biased up to active manipulation. Only people who always agree with the politics they want to push have not noticed at this point.
Rule number 1: don't argue with conspiracy theorists, they will come up with all sorts of nonsense.
Have they? Show me some of those manipulated fact checkers, please. With reputable sources, I'm not inclined to read bullshit.
Not really, no. Or show us some data.
conveniently only available in dutch, but online translators to the rescue:
where the first paragraph in 6.4 translates as follows:
Oops. Well, you tried.
You seem to be really emotional about this. Need to say, the psychogram of those who defend pharma relentlessly to this day is very interesting. I see anger, insults, trampling onto what an obviously fascist authority teached them at the end of 2021 is „below them“ to elevate oneself. Ignorance of obvious data, sidelining.
By now I have seen enough actual data - and on top of that a lot of sad „anecdata“ in my direct surroundings - to pay attention at least. Given its prevalence I am sure you have seen the anecdata as well. Have you called someone who claimed to have a vax damage or who told you a relative died from the vax a „conspiracy theorist“ yet?
One good alternative point to start your journey in 2024 could be the US civilian labor force disability data. And no, I won’t waste time to search for that for you, given that you began your „response“ by attaching a label because it soothes you mentally. It has all been out there for long time and has been linked countless times.
The little section you got from google translating is a government-approved interpretation of this data. I have seen several others. You can download the data and fact-check for yourself.
I'm not, don't worry :)
The only one who is hurling insults and seems quite angry is you.
ah yes, just call regulatory agencies "fascist", that makes total sense.
once again an insult instead of data
No it's not. It's what scientists say. Are they fascists too now?
People were fired for not taking a novel pharmaceutical product, warp-speeded by Donald Trump and sold as a cure-all. They lost their livelihood over exercising a fundamental human right.
In places like Canada they could not use public transport or leave the country. In some countries they could not enter supermarkets. Austria decided to fine them steeply and monthly. In the US 60% of one political side agreed with throwing them into camps and discussed it openly.
Across all media and in society they were labeled and treated as pariahs.
Meanwhile they observed obvious carnage in their friends and family and could only watch.
What did you do at the end of 2021 while all of this happened?
Not to her face, no. Not in those words, at least. But that’s because it would upset my mother to have to deal with her idiot conspiracy theorist sister complaining about me being rude, so I am scrupulously polite while dismissing all her crap and she is increasingly sensible about not mentioning it around me. Just as well I started this effort before covid happened or it might not have been enough.
The ONS data linked the comment you're replying to is clear that it counts "vaccinated" from the day of vaccination. What ONS data are you referring to which "used to have the obvious flaw that people dropping dead 3 days after their first dose were defined as unvaccinated"?
Where?
Given previous experience with people who years into this still want to be served everything on a silver plate, entering any discussion with you will be futile. You responded solely for the dompamin your brain gives you when you trample onto people that an "authority" presented you as outsiders to your tribe. No factual argument will convince you.
Even with all the easily verifiable information in this thread alone you did not make the effort to check for yourself, and are so convinced of your position that you aren't even embarrassed about demonstrating your ignorance.
It is incredibly easy to find by now. In mid 2021 you had to search, think about and analyze the excess mortality stats yourself to see the obvious signal, now it's being discussed widely. But you will never start this journey on your own out of fear your will be expelled from your perceived tribe.
The Dutch data has the same problem as the ONS data that I describe in my other comment:
> For the first mRNA vaccination, almost all [hazard ratios], for the different weeks after vaccination and different subgroups, are significantly lower than 1, which indicates a reduced risk of non-COVID-19 death shortly after vaccination.
Obviously vaccination is not supposed to reduce your risk from things unrelated to COVID-19 yet in their data it does. This isn't because it's some magical cure-all. It's because their data is biased. The correct hazard ratio is found only in the 12-49 age group.
As they say in their discussion, this is because "in the event of a very short remaining life expectancy, (a subsequent dose of) COVID-19 vaccination may be decided against ... Vaccination is also postponed in the event of a fever ... This is also called the 'healthy vaccine effect' and it is difficult to correct for this in observational research ... the results should be interpreted with caution"
They also have the problem that "people who have been vaccinated, but have not given permission for registration in CIMS, have been incorrectly classified as unvaccinated (5 to 7 percent of the people)" which means that "This will have influenced the analysis of the risk of death after the first vaccination, because in this analysis the unvaccinated person time served as a reference"
So this dataset is not usable for detecting vaccine side effects or induced deaths. It is a hopelessly corrupted dataset in which large numbers of people are misclassified and it's not a randomized study.
But this is public health research, so after saying results should be interpreted with caution they go ahead and make the totally incautious claim that "Based on these results there are no indications at a population level that COVID-19 vaccination increases the risk of death due to an adverse event." which is a false statement. Their data doesn't allow them to draw such conclusions.
The reason this topic is neuralgic is because if you want to be scientifically correct then you can't actually know whether vaccines reduced deaths or not, but people really want to believe they did. The trials that were supposed to unambiguously measure this failed, in the sense that they showed no effect on deaths and yielded incorrect conclusions about reductions in infection rates (the number started at 95% effective and then was regularly revised, this is not supposed to happen and was due to their time windowing problems). Then attempts to measure it using mass datasets collected outside of RT context all yield incorrect conclusions due to dataset bias, but are presented as definitive anyway for political reasons.
Science is truly in a bad shape :(
Thank you for this summary. I have seen some analyses (including from the „pro vax“ side, even though it is to be despised for their fascist behavior alone) that made the Dutch data appear more useful for these questions. But tbh, what did I expect - last time I checked the Dutch government still voted against doing an honest investigation into the ongoing excess deaths too.
Is there any official data of this kind you would trust right now?
To be fair, I have seen enough by now; the main open question for me is what role endemic covid in all those believing the cure-all narrative and going out partying before milder variants came out played.
The ONS data cannot be used that way unfortunately, and the ONS themselves have admitted to that fact. If you take the ONS data literally then COVID vaccines are a magical elixir of luck that protect against every cause of death including car crashes.
There are at least two problems:
1. The statistically invalid time-windowing games the public health agencies all played in which people who had taken vaccines were classed as unvaccinated. The sibling comment talks about that. Prof Norman Fenton has shown how this yields incorrectly high calculations of effectiveness.
2. Healthy vaccinee bias, in which people who are about to die aren't vaccinated at all because there's no point, and the sort of people who take lots of vaccines tend to be obsessive about health and risk in other ways.
Problems like these with observational data are why drugs are put through trials before being launched to market. If we check the data for say the Pfizer trial, what we see is no effect on mortality and serious problems with statistical power also, simply because so few people were dying of COVID it was basically impossible to run a trial large enough to prove it had any effect.
As I have just replied to the other commenter, the ONS data he appears to object to categorises various "vaccinated" categories starting immediately after vaccination. The regulator's reply to Fenton makes this clear: https://osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/correspondence/ed-hum...
I assume this reply is what you refer to when you say that the ONS admit the data cannot be used that way. However, since that reply, the ASMR calculation now uses data linked to the 2021 census which covers around 91% of the population. Paul Mainwood graphed the ASMRs here: https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1627979309812965381
I see no evidence here that being vaccinated makes you more likely to die, which is what the original thread was about.
Humpherson simply says that "ONS ... do receive data in [people within two weeks of vaccination], and that the individual would fall into the ‘vaccinated’ category" which is a meaningless tautology, as the entire argument is about the definition of vaccinated used by the public health agencies.
Invalid definitions are a very real and pervasive problem, not only being standard in the public health literature but also standard practice for public health agencies. Fenton has compiled a partial (!) list of papers and studies which do this:
https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-very-best-of-c...
Note that UK HSA and studies using ONS data are shown to use invalid definitions.
> the ASMR calculation now uses data linked to the 2021 census which covers around 91% of the population
They say it does, but the UK government doesn't really the true population size. They've admitted this in the past. The 2021 census is unlikely to have solved it given that the civil service doesn't really want to know (if they could actually get full coverage, then they could identify every illegal immigrant). This showed up badly during COVID where more people came forward to be vaccinated than theoretically existed at all in certain age groups. They also told people that only a small percentage of the population was unvaccinated, but when the BBC commissioned a poll as part of a programme they were making (on misinformation!) around 25% of respondents said they were unvaccinated, a huge gap.
So the data quality here is of garbage grade in almost every respect, which is a scandal. People who just tune out and decide nothing governments say on the topic can be trusted are well within reasonable bounds.
The ONS mortality stats linked to by kadkadels at the start of the thread contain data related to people who received at least one COVID vaccine (counted from the day they received it, subdivided by time since reception and number of boosters), as well as an unvaccinated category who never did. This is clear to anyone who read the link that kadkadels posted.
Both you and armchairdweller falsely claimed that the unvaccinated category included people who received the vaccine less than N days ago, presumably because you believe that some deaths caused by the vaccine shortly after people receive it are hidden by these stats. But in fact, the vaccinated category starts from the day of vaccination, the unvaccinated tended to die more back when COVID was new, and the ASMR for unvaccinated and vaccinated converged by about the end of 2022, presumably because we've nearly all had COVID at least once so being vaxed now isn't doing a whole lot of good. Both the "vax did more harm than good" crowd and the "we should still be wearing masks" crowd are wrong.
Fenton is in HART, and HART are off their collective rockers, as we knew pretty early on when their internal chats were leaked. See https://www.logically.ai/articles/hart-files-anti-vaccine-my... and https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1421397013078360064 for example, and my own small part in pointing out that all the astroturfing groups identified by Neil O'Brien MP were hosted on a single IP address (HART almost immediately moved, lol): https://twitter.com/nameandnature/status/1352998804832870402
Though the prime mover, Narice Bernard, seems to have moved on to newer conspiracies involving "climate lockdowns" and "15 minute cities", people who conclude that nothing HART say on COVID topics can trusted are well within reasonable bounds.
To clarify the claims: The main problem with time windowing is in the effectiveness calculations. That claim isn't specific to England or the ONS, it shows up in many studies and countries.
The main problem with UK-specific death statistics is that they (the ONS) don't know the true size of the denominator.
Regardless of the above, due to widespread intellectual corruption in academia and public health, virtually no data on the topic of COVID or COVID vaccines can be taken at face value.
> Fenton is in HART, and HART are off their collective rockers
Your link says those messages came from a public chat room that literally anyone could sign up for. So Fenton has published things on a website that hosts a chat room where other people said things you disagree with. If that's your best counter to Fenton, and not some issue with his methodologies, then it's safe to assume you concede his points are correct.
We are not talking about vaccine efficiency or efficacy here though but adverse events specifically.
The point is that there are almost no serious adverse events occuring post-vaccination. There is no pharmacovigilance safety signal or concerning pattern wrt MRNA-vaccines. As we have seen in 2021 with the astra zeneca vaccine, post market surveillance worked and it was promptly investigated as soon as a safety signal emerged. EMA (and other regulatory agencies) communicated transparently about their findings and decisions.
Thank you for reminding me of this fine example of post-market surveillance, I almost forgot :)
Im not sure how anyone could still belive in factcheckers that claims previously that vaccination gives immunity to virus or that there are no side effects from vaccination even though we have plenty studies that monitor it quite precisely.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772059
And I'm not sure how anyone can be a conspiracy theorist and honestly believe that all governments and regulatory agencies all over the world try to hide some grand conspiracy about vaccine efficacy and safety, but here we are.
Who claims that? Nobody does or did. This is a familiar tactic: shifting the goalposts from vaccinations have very rare side effects and do not guarantee one hundred percent immunity to complete immunity and no side effects at all. Rarely does a vaccine provide complete 100% immunity from a disease, in rare cases it does, e.g. Polio. Also nobody ever claimed that vaccines have no side effects, they are just very, very rare. So rare that the expected benefits far outweigh any risk of side effects.
Most factchecker refers to CDC, that claimed:
Fully vaccinated people can: -Visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing -Visit with unvaccinated people from a single household who are at low risk for severe COVID-19 disease indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing -Refrain from quarantine and testing following a known exposure if asymptomatic
Today, text is deleted and exists only in archive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210310000819/https://www.cdc.g...
Calling someone, who have different experience and opinions, supported by studies as conspiracy theorist shows, how ignorant about this topic you are.
Sweden let Covid go through their population in 2020. New Zealand allowed Covid to spread only in 2022. Both countries vaccinated their population during 2021. Sweden had a wave of excess deaths in 2020. In New Zealand, excess mortality started to increase in 2022. Excess deaths are correlated with the times of Covid waves, not with vaccinations.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-mortali...
The ABS releases all manner of aggregate anon data, eg:
https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-australias-excess-...
The Australian states all have comprehensive medical records that have allowed people such as Prof. Fiona Stanley, an Australian epidemiologist to gain international recognition for their work teasing out relationships in many different medical disorders.
Access to fine grained records is limited to researchers for privacy reasons but the pool of researchers across the country is large enoug to rule out any conspiracy to keep secrets (unless someone is deep down a truther well).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Stanley
Good that Australia is not the only country in the world, indeed. In the US, there was a measurable change in death rates once Blue states (Democrats) got vaccinated by May of 2021. Red states, led by Trumpism, where right wing media trumpeted vaccine conspiracy theories, which lowered their vaccination rate, had higher death rates.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828...
Dont believe the 98% vax rate nonsense, in my circle of friends (including 4 doctors, 3 nurses) most got fake certificates. Dont be suprised that a bulk of the medical profession also did the same. I’m disappointed these professionals with very smart people just decided to bypass the mandates in order to keep their jobs instead of taking a firm stand for the benefit of society. Thats humanity for you.
Lots of people navigate through the cracks. The least you can do (as an individual) is acknowledge the corrupt system and stop spreading the 98% stat which is purely propaganda. And hold the politicians accountable.
Well, people self select their associates to a large extent. I’m sure bank robbers know other bank robbers, but that doesn’t make it a common characteristic.
Valid point, like minded people flock together. As long as we acknowledge other people exist, and their views / values can be different. Who am I to mandate how you should live? I also expect the same “live & let live” from others. The mandates interfered with the “let live” part since I know of a fatal vaccine sideeffect case.
Apparently you want to mandate that I live in a society that lets people remain unvaccinated. I don’t want that, but I do want to live in a society that doesn’t mandate sharing the public right of way with cars. It interferes with the “let live” part since I know of millions of fatal car cases.
No no no you got it all wrong about bank robbers. The last thing you want as a bank robber is to associate with other bank robbers regularly.
Why should anyone believe your brand of nonsense instead though?
I got vaccinated for COVID in Australia multiple times and never once got a certificate .. my ID and the fact of vaccination were recorded in the medical database which is where the vaccination numbers come from.
How many of the 26 million Australians in toto can you demonstrate faked their vaccination status?
The least you can do (as an individual) is back up your bogus smelling anecdata.
You can choose to believe what you want, entering data in a database is very simple, and corresponds to vaccine lot numbers which are flushed down a sink. Its more common than you think. But who do you despise - the people navigating cracks in the system or the people forcing them to react? The mandates are wrong.
Mortality of productive population 15-44 still rising after 2021 in EU.
https://euromomo.eu
Thank you for the link.
Currently the pooled deaths 15-44 are reported as below the long term 1,600 baseline ( https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ ).
Regardless, I'm not sure if you have a point here that connects vaccination to significant numbers adverse after effects.
There are many studies (1) monitoring side effects of vaccines. Of course it is one, not only, reason of increased mortality.
(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772059
Could also be: delayed checkups, e.g. blood pressure, cancer. Delayed treatment. Other transmittable diseases, for example novel flu variants. But no, it has to be the vaccine.
Yes. The symptoms started the day after her 3rd jab. Basically she got that “woa i got jabbed yesterday and feel like shit” thing many people got, but then it just never went away. She got covid 1.5 months after that jab so there’s no telling whether the jab or the covid was the key cause to her long-time postcovid. The covid infection itself wasn’t particularly heavy.
We very much want to stay out of the “covid vaccines are evil/fantastic” debate. It’s fruitless. I will not respond to any comment suggesting that somehow we’re wrong and well actually, it couldn’t have been caused by the vaccine / the covid infection, or that postcovid is an imaginary disease.
Thank you for your honesty.
Maybe one of the downvoters would like to explain why he / she finds this question so emotionally triggering.
I didn't downvote, but I'll answer anyway: there was a propaganda campaign of unprecedented scale espousing the "safety" of these covid vaccines (which didn't go through the normal, rigorous testing process that vaccines usually go through). The propaganda was so successful that a large percentage of the population is still fanatically making false claims about vaccine safety, despite the large number of people who reported serious adverse side effects. At this point pretty much every person on earth knows at least one person who has "long covid symptoms" from the covid vaccine. And yet we have a bunch of people re-enacting the propaganda of 2021 and downvoting any comment that talks about vaccine side effects...
Most of them seem to be convinced it was because of finally getting infected (just scroll around this page for a bunch of examples), and I think they're half right. Late 2022 there was a paper about how the mRNA vaccines caused the body to produce more IgG4 antibodies*, which, simplified, are a sort of "stand down" antibody meant for things like dust and pollen.
I think in at least some people the mRNA vaccines appear to work by suppressing symptoms (which also explains Pfizer's 95% effective, in that trial they only tested people who actually showed symptoms first), but actually they allow the virus to run rampant when the person is eventually infected. So the association is with the virus instead of the vaccines, and they assume it would have been worse without when we just really don't know.
* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.ade2798
I have a family member who got severe symptoms after each vaccine shot. For the first 3 shots the symptoms eventually subsided. For the 4th shot they didn't. And it's been a few years now. I suspect it's a chronic condition.
Coming back to your point, is it possible that my family member - just by pure coincidence - happened to get covid immediately after each shot? 4 times?
The earliest vaccines injected at tiny amount of the disease, from smallpox on. So she probably expected to feel like shit, and that's why she felt like shit.
However the covid vaccines did not have any covid in them. So there is no way she got a taste of covid shittyness.
Most traditional vaccines consist of either killed or weakened forms of a virus or bacterium. These provoke an immune response that allows the body to fight off the actual pathogen later on.
Instead of delivering a virus, RNA vaccines deliver genetic information that allows the body’s own cells to produce a viral protein which stimulate the immune system to mount a response, without posing any risk of infection.
Also cause great potential for autoimmune reaponse. Because spike proteins wont stay only in muscle where was mRNA vaccine injected. Thats why dedinition of vaccines was changed in 2020.
“Well actually, your sick wife couldn’t have gotten sick when she got sick”
I know I said I wouldn’t respond to this but I can’t not. Do you understand how unkind you’re being? You don’t understand how postcovid works because nobody does. Maybe it’s not caused directly by the virus but by the immune response, or something else entirely, or a combination of 7 things, who knows. I’m telling you it started the day after her third jab. This is n=1 stuff, not generalizable science, but you’re suggesting that my wife is imagining things for 2 years and counting now, which you can apparently diagnose by reading an internet comment or two, and I’m saying it’s not nice to piss on people with real problems like that. Please try to be less dismissive.
I had four covid vaccines with no trouble whatsoever, but after catching covid for real, I was hospitalised for a night, slowly recovered, and then a few months later got the fatigue and brain fog. Now, 2 years later, I have recovered my physical fitness, but the brain fog remains.
Different people respond to the vaccines and the real thing differently. But this is an anecdatum saying the vaccines were fine.
There are some expansive postcovid & postvax protocols on the flccc pages. Early on I had checked some of their references (e.g. on natto) and it looked good enough considering the speed of real science. Maybe good to check them out, and natto makes a good breakfast. In general they assume the condition is some kind of spikeopathy, wherever it comes from.
(The holy-vax crowd has discredited anything not approved by the marketing departments of the pharmaceutical industry from the beginning, so they won’t like this either.)
Could it be that she's simply out of practice?
I doubt it. It’s not like you ever stop practicing remembering things or doing everyday math tasks.
Look, this is anecdata. I’m not making a claim about this article. I just know that my wife got substantially stupider overnight 2 years ago (plus lots of other symptoms). Via a postcovid support group organized by a semi government club here in NL she knows a bunch more people with long-term postcovid and this is the one symptom they all share. Might well still be some weird sort of selection bias etc; again, I’m not saying this is generalizable science, I’m saying that my wife got noticeably less smart and it started at the same time as all her other postcovid symptoms.
I would be careful with some of the self-help groups. They can reinforce symptoms rather than improve them. A case in point is a friend of mine who thought she had post-covid symptoms and cognitive decline. She went to a similar group and found a lot of very miserable people with depression. When talking to them they had similar stories of lost relatives, lost jobs and general social decline. But all had a common thing which was they weren't dealing with those issues in a healthy ways. It was turning into a drinking club pretty much after the event was over. Even if you had problems this would exacerbate them over time.
There was a hefty dividing line among my friendship group after covid which was people who went down that route and people who went down the health and fitness route. The latter seem to be doing much better in all aspects even if they started in the former group.
I was running 10km once a week before. It knocked me off my feet entirely and I don't run often now which got to me for a few months. But I fought it and can do that again now if I need to. It hurt that it did that to me but it taught me how fragile things are. Also to note I'm a qualified mathematician but some days to months I can't add numbers together and this turns out mostly to be I'm tired or not in the right state of mind rather than anything persistent. Lots of causes - best to look for the obvious ones first.
I'm pretty scared to look into many mental health issues. I know a buddy who had a super mild case of tourette syndrome but after he researched things started getting worse.
On a similar note, I had some mild PTSD symptoms until I looked into it, then I started having additional symptoms(or at least I was noticing them now). On the flip side having ChatGPT4 combine my PTSD with phenomenology, positive psychology, and CBT, I think I'm close to cured. My favorite part was being able to disagree with chatGPT. When I disagree with humans, I feel like I was getting stuck in a loop.
Could you give more explanations about how you’ve been using ChatGPT to get better?
Say your problem, say you want to use CBT/Positive Psychology/Phenomenology (pick one).
Play along with it, I had some pretty eye opening moments during Eidetic variation of Phenomenology, but that was me personally. I think CBT/Stoicism may be able to help people who havent been corrupted by Nietzsche-like ideas.
Thanks for the details. Would you agree to contact me on Signal using the link in my profile?
Yeah, well aware. Fortunately her group is an impressively can-do-attitude bunch, and she’s getting very concrete ideas from it. I think it helps that it was organized by a government-y instance who did some checking, and isn’t some facebook group turned physical or sth.
(Also, no drinking. That would be madness. Nobody in that group drinks at all anymore, it would set back their recovery by a lot)
For example, she had a cold last march which totally knocked her remaining bits of physical energy out of her, and she worried that she wouldn’t be able to come on a planned family trip to the zoo, because of the lengthy walking involved. She shared that worry in the group and another woman said “but then just rent a wheelchair at the entrance and get yourself rolled around most of the time! That’s kinda confronting, “I’m now a person who sometimes needs a wheelchair”, but it’s also very constructive and awesome if you get over that and it helps you get out of the house. We did that trip, it was super awkward (esp when she stood up from the wheelchair and everybody could see that well actually, her legs work fine), and we had a great time and for the first time after a big outing she wasn’t sick in bed for 3 days after.
Btw, a sidenote, “just go sporting” is terrible advice for people with heavy postcovid. Look up “post exertional malaise”. You gotta build it up very carefully, never push yourself too hard. It’s very hard but it appears to work (given enough patience).
Don't worry about it being awkward, there are many reasons for being in a wheelchair besides not being able to walk at all. I mean, the fact that wheelchairs are provided at the entrance indicates that there is a demand from individuals who can walk to access them.
Nice observation! Appreciate this
Cam relate. After a month of being floored by COVID in 2020 (thankfully without a need for forced ventilation), I had pretty terrible brain fog. After a year, the fog was gone, but to this day many mental tasks take more effort and time, even though I can still do them again.
Odd. I also felt that my memory is not as good as it was used to, and I experiences Doorway effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorway_effect) more frequently in recent years compare to before.
But I'm not really sure it was due to COVID or just simply being old (or due to been forced to live in a confined space for long period of time).
This seems to be the issue - we're trying to study COVID, which affected literally the whole population of earth at this point, and we have no control group of people who have not been affected.
People have gotten older, have gone through mass societal change, and any other number of things in between.
Also in every study we need a control group. How do you know for sure that the control group didn't get COVID. For all I know there is no way to know for sure you haven't been infected or sick of Covid in those 4 years, it is not like testing has been very reliable.
I know for damn sure I didn't get COVID yet. I don't go outside I don't work I haven't since I really graduated from high school years and years and years ago because I'm disabled and I got three vaccines so far but the rare time I leave the house for groceries I'm always fully masked in a 3M n95. I've never came down with symptoms and I live alone, I'm pretty ideal unless I got asymptomatic at some point.
Yes, but you are also very different from the average person. So not real useful as a control group for typical people.
About a third of infections were completely asymptomatic, so that's not unlikely at all.
I dunno if that is relevant - it's the symptoms (brain inflammation[1]) that is hypothesised to correspond with lower cognitive function.
Even if you did have COVID, but didn't get brain inflammation[1], you can still serve as a control.
[1] I say "brain inflammation"; the exact mechanism is explained by a comment upthread.
I know people who have been in long term covid studies since maybe April 2020, in what was the Seattle Flu study: self testing at least weekly back then and sending in samples regularly. The first people recruited were all the medical researchers at that institution and nearby who worked on things with no connection to covid, but relevant enough lab knowledge that they were trusted to understand how to self test.
And some people might be faking it.
I always thought "getting old" was in part an accumulation of damage from infections and slow wear on the body.
How long ago was she sick?
For me it's gotten better. I got sick in August 2021, the major effects (fatigue and brain fog) were most pronounced between September and February, and I've been steadily improving since. I think I'm somewhere around 80% pre-Covid capacity most days.
Woa this is a great thing to hear actually. She got sick January 2022 so a bit over 2 years now. Our current fear is that this is the kind of thing where either you recover within ~2 years or it’s forever. Appreciate your story and will share with her.
Her other symptoms, particularly the fatigue, do seem to improve (though the weather and being about to be outside impacts it a lot, so she had a huge setback 2 winters in a row now), though very slowly. I like hearing that for you the brain thing has improved over time too, thanks!
Happy my story can help.
It's been a long ride, coming up on three years. Because of the symptoms I was prompted to invest in self improvement as well. I am much more diligent about regularly exercising, eating better, minding my mental health* and minding my sleep; and there are still bad days where I can't concentrate at all. But things are getting better overall.
* Every day I don't read or watch the news I'm happier.
The news trick really helps huh. We do it too and wow
Have you tried autoimmune protocol diet? Anecdotally, but it may help.
Weather impact on mood and energy is unbelievable, at least in myself.
Also, if that can help, contrary to my previous beliefs, light therapy is no bullshit. I thought it was another pseudo science but studies are in fact proving that it’s incredibly effective (but it’s pretty inconvenient to incorporate in your habits).
what sort of light therapy have you found beneficial? Like blue light in the eyes or red light on the skin?
I use a Beurer TL30
I am in 3 years post-covid. Definitely saw some lows but have been recovering steadily. Definitely look into Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment for this, for me it helped fight the plateau.
I have a very math-heavy competitive hobby which I found myself suddenly very bad at (relative to my previous performance) for 6-8 weeks after all my other covid symptoms were gone.
I appear to have recovered within 90 days, but I don’t know if I was left with permanent damage or not. I had no way to objectively test.
Your competitive performance level seems like a pretty objective way to test
There’s too much noise in the signal, and it’s also a skill gradient that I have been climbing for years. I don’t have enough samples to compare, and the samples don’t share enough similar context anymore.
If covid was a bioweapon, it was a very well-planned one.
I've noticed this with bullet chess, although not with reference to COVID specifically. My rating (such as it is) is extremely sensitive to mental health issues.
My girlfriend has pretty bad post-covid, the thing that helped her most was getting on Citalopram. There's suspicions that many SSRI's have a anti-inflammatory effect on the brain, which might be the mechanism.
She's currently in oxygen therapy, we're positive about the effects but since it's dominating her life (and energy) at the moment it's hard to say what the effect is.
SSRIs have some nasty side effects though, including sexual dysfunction.
For sure, but so does heavy post-covid. It's a trade-off that's well worth it for her. It improved her memory and brain clarity a fair bit to the point that it's doable to get through the days hoping for a cure (or at least a way to get back to a normal life).
FWIW anxiety also results in exhaustion and brain fog, so I'm not surprised that it's had a positive impact in this way, it's just unfortunate that it's not without it's downsides.
I watched my partner have a very bad run in with Epstein-Barr Virus (a decade ago). Wiped her out for months and months. It took years before she was back to 100%.
It might not be clear what all the causes of long-covid, brain fog are but it's definitely possible for viruses to have long lasting and poorly studied impacts.
And I think these long-term effects requires ongoing research and attention
My wife who is more than 2 years sick with Long/Post Covid, lost almost everything because of it, her body and her brain. She had almost perfect memory and spoke 5 languages fluently by the age of 30 while learning Chinese as a 6th. She had a promising career in the medicine field and was also quite a good painter and other crafts (not famous though). We were hiking regularly to very high mountains and doing a lot of activities.
Now she spends most of the day in bed and the rest on the sofa and she can’t barely do anything, only crochet… maybe some cooking. Not even watch movies that have too much action, so she is watching black and white series now to have something to do without getting cognitively burnout. She lost her memory, her capacity to think, she has chronic fatigue and many other weird symptoms like easily getting senses overwhelmed by simple noises or smells.
We went to a lot of doctors, tried a few “remedies” from small scientific studies and internet: metformin, nicotine, lidocaine, multiple supplements and vitamins, some antivirals and many other things. Nobody is able to help her and most of doctors don’t even try to help or know anything about this new and growing condition.
Of course always the “psychosomatic” smart ass appears, but there are enough proofs already to tell them to shut up. Even the NIH director mentioned viral persistence found body tissues in a recent talk [1].
At least the awareness is growing and there are s lot of studies going on. So still some hope, but it won’t come fast.
[1] https://x.com/californiacodes/status/1780099073468764415
Yup, and, right on cue, they're all over this thread already coping. Sorry to hear about your wife's situation.
There is an interesting paper (the main author seems to be from Netherlands, too) about potential mechanism of action that makes Covid infections have long-term repercussions published last year at https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/immunology/articles/10.....
(Brain, of course, is also an organ, so brain fog and reduction in mental capabilities could easily fall under this.)
I got infected with COVID twice, thankfully only after being vaccinated and didn't experience heavy physical effects but the cognitive issues I had on my first infection triggered a really bad anxiety.
At some point I was playing chess with my girlfriend after 4-5 days from getting symptoms, after 3 moves (so pretty much still in the beginning of the openings) my brain simply could not understand what I was trying to do, like I couldn't connect a previous thought to the next, there was an impassable barrier between these thoughts that I couldn't get through.
It got worse when I realised I had no idea what I was doing and while looking at the board I couldn't remember how the pieces moved, I looked at my bishop on the board and couldn't think where it could go. I started to cry, my whole job is to think things through, connect diverging thoughts, I got extremely scared I was going to lose this basic ability that enables me to do my job...
I lost the senses of smell and taste for about 10 days so definitely had neurological issues from COVID, the feeling of not being able to think properly was the worse of the feelings. The fever was ok, never broke too high and it was short-lived for about a couple of hours, feeling my heart was not comfortable but bearable and I wouldn't get too tired.
I'm so glad it was temporary, and so sorry for your wife having this lingering on her, I do not wish it to anyone.
My memory also suffered after COVID. Additionally, I've noticed that I become tired more quickly after reading books