Covid Brain Fog: ‘I feel like I have dementia’

Nurse practitioner Lisa Mizelle has Covid brain fog 

The New York Time reports on a growing number of what appears to be long-term brain damage in patients who had been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus that is responsible for the pandemic. This is scary. The NYT writes: 

“After contracting the coronavirus in March, Michael Reagan lost all memory of his 12-day vacation in Paris, even though the trip was just a few weeks earlier. .... In meetings, “I can’t find words,” said Mr. Reagan, who has now taken a leave. “I feel like I sound like an idiot.”

Several weeks after Erica Taylor recovered from her Covid-19 symptoms of nausea and cough, she became confused and forgetful, failing to even recognize her own car, the only Toyota Prius in her apartment complex’s parking lot.

Lisa Mizelle, a veteran nurse practitioner at an urgent care clinic who fell ill with the virus in July, finds herself forgetting routine treatments and lab tests, and has to ask colleagues about terminology she used to know automatically. “I leave the room and I can’t remember what the patient just said,” she said, adding that if she hadn’t exhausted her medical leave she’d take more time off. “It scares me to think I’m working,” Ms. Mizelle, 53, said. ‘I feel like I have dementia.’

It’s becoming known as Covid brain fog: troubling cognitive symptoms that can include memory loss, confusion, difficulty focusing, dizziness and grasping for everyday words. Increasingly, Covid survivors say brain fog is impairing their ability to work and function normally.

‘There are thousands of people who have that,’ said Dr. Igor Koralnik, chief of neuro-infectious disease at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, who has already seen hundreds of survivors at a post-Covid clinic he leads. ‘The impact on the work force that’s affected is going to be significant.’

Scientists aren’t sure what causes brain fog, which varies widely and affects even people who became only mildly physically ill from Covid-19 and had no previous medical conditions. Leading theories are that it arises when the body’s immune response to the virus doesn’t shut down or from inflammation in blood vessels leading to the brain.

But research on long-lasting brain fog is just beginning. A French report in August on 120 patients who had been hospitalized found that 34 percent had memory loss and 27 percent had concentration problems months later. 

In a soon-to-be-published survey of 3,930 members of Survivor Corps, a group of people who have connected to discuss life after Covid, over half reported difficulty concentrating or focusing, said Natalie Lambert, an associate research professor at Indiana University School of Medicine, who helped lead the study. It was the fourth most common symptom out of the 101 long-term and short-term physical, neurological and psychological conditions that survivors reported. Memory problems, dizziness or confusion were reported by a third or more respondents.”

If this preliminary estimate of one-third of Covid survivors having some degree of brain fog holds up, that would mean that of the 7.7 million Americans who have been infected so far, about 2.6 million will experience some degree of Covid brain fog. The people who experience this are not all elderly. 

A 31-year old attorney was so disoriented that she washed her TV remote with the laundry and returned a dog she was fostering because she no longer trusted herself to take proper care of the animal. The NYT quoted her: “One morning, ‘everything in my brain was white static,’ she said. ‘I was sitting on the edge of the bed, crying and feeling ‘something’s wrong, I should be asking for help,’ but I couldn’t remember who or what I should be asking. I forgot who I was and where I was.’” 

Doctors simply do not know when or if this brain fog sickness will go away, of if it might worsen over time.

Thirty-one year old attorney Erica Taylor

 “I forgot who I was and where I was”

Our toxic president

In the last few days, the president blithely but falsely stated that people just get over the infection like he allegedly did. His advice: “Don’t be afraid of it.” Not surprisingly, he was wrong about all of that. Not only will none of the roughly 215,000 Americans the virus has killed so far never get over it, it now looks like a significant number of survivors will be mentally impaired to some degree for some period of time, maybe seriously impaired for the rest of the lives of some. 

Is it just me, or does it seem that just about everything our toxic, incompetent, liar president touches gets botched or poisoned and damaged or destroyed? That millions of Americans still support this incompetent, callous president is mind-blowing.