For some reason, an outfit called BioBank scanned over 40,000 brains in the three years previous to the outbreak of the pandemic. There's a story there somewhere, but not that I could find, even though I looked hard.
At any rate, some clinicians in the UK recently reported on a study wherein they re-scanned 394 of those folks, all of whom had contracted and survived COVID-19, and compared the before and after. They also compared the re-scans to 388 previously-scanned subjects who did not contract COVID-19.
Guess what? Yep. "We identified significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain with a loss of grey matter..." Most of the brain cell loss was in the "gustatory and olfactory" regions - the parts of the brain that control the sense of smell and the sense of taste. They also found "loss of grey matter" in other areas of the brain.
The neurologists found little difference between the effects of mild and severe cases of COVID. So if I'm reading this correctly, a consequence of being infected with the virus is a loss of brain cells. Not a cute inability to smell or taste for a couple of days, but permanently dead brain cells - which are famously unable to reproduce themselves, and so when you lose them, they stay lost.
Around the world, about 164 million people have gotten, and survived, COVID-19 up to this point. If this study is accurate (and, of course, "more research needs to be done," etc., etc.), hundreds of millions of people will emerge from this pandemic with permanent brain injury. The effects apparently range from severe to mild, and it's "only" in the taste and smell centers, but - permanent brain damage.
This is a blog about the new world - what it might be like - and so we need to acknowledge that this is one of the things that the new world might be like. But I think we also have an opportunity to say, again, "Don't get it." It's not a joke, a hoax, a mere inconvenience. Stay safe. Get vaccinated.
Geez.
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